Let Me Be and Let Me Be Me
I’ve been trying to educate Amazon so that it’s less annoying and more useful. At best, experiencing the “annoying” side is a bit like Ralphie in “A Christmas Story”, suffering gifts from an aunt who labored under the delusion that he was perpetually 5 years old and a girl.
Amazon thinks I’m a baker, because I ordered some kitchen stuff I was too busy to buy and lug home myself. They think Mike‘s a camper, because he bought an air mattress.
As I go to Amazon right now, they remember me. To prove it there’s a profile-driven showcase of Murakami, actual carnivorous plants, wooden spoons, and books on everything from media to incest to spirituality. (You buy a few Anais Nin books all in one go and then it’s Henry Miller and incest for like 6 months). Some people might like this a lot though, and the experience has fueled a funny article on The Onion. Still, they don’t seem to understand the human threshold for “enough already, let it go.”
Yahoo was a relationship in which I really felt like I’d had enough. I used them since their beginning, picked a name way too long (a nickname from my oldest brother) and a password way too short, even though it’s sturdy and l33t. Over time part of my daily chores were to suffer Yahoo’s nagging warnings about storage space so I could actually receive all of my mail. Then I had to sort it and save it if I wanted to keep it. One day I broke down and paid money for an upgraded account. Within that same week they announced that now everyone was going to be upgraded for free! But thanks for that money you sent last week, we’ll still keep that.
I didn’t actually break up with Yahoo then. I couldn’t very easily because of all the connections flowing to it, especially Amazon. Instead I relegated them to newsletters and unsexy tasks, giving that address to any entity I didn’t care about, allowing it to fill up with messages from elderly email-forwarders whose feelings I didn’t want to hurt by explaining the full meaning of “spam” again. When not at home I used Squirrel Mail, until gmail came along.
Up until last year, miaeaton.com was owned by an international model living in Brooklyn. Lucky for me, she got pregnant, stopped updating and eventually took down her modeling portfolio site. She must have decided she didn’t care enough to keep the domain as her priorities shifted. Her name stayed the same but her identity changed. Since she was master of her domain (bad pun alert!) that was possible. As it should be.
I left my Yahoo account to wither on the vine, didn’t feed it for a few years until it was safe to leave it for good. I was almost free. But I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to change my email address with Amazon. You can do it now, but I swear that until recently it wasn’t possible. And you couldn’t delete old addresses, even old contact names! This provided me with a nasty little feeling whenever I had to go in and make sure that something I’d just ordered with one-click wouldn’t be going to an address from years ago.
I felt like, if I could just change Amazon, I wouldn’t need Yahoo.
Until Yahoo bought Flickr. boo. hiss.
When Flickr was bought by Yahoo last month, and long-time Flickr users were told they’d be forced to log in with a Yahoo account (meaning they either had to get one, or connect their Yahoo and Flickr accounts) there was some backlash to this, a group even formed called Flick Off, who planned to ditch Flickr the day before Yahoo would be merging the accounts. Yahoo didn’t respond, but didn’t give an exact date for the merger. Pretty sneaky, Sis.
The whole point of Flickr was (is?) its independence, its openness. It’s smart and obvious and easy. You can log in or not, consume or contribute.
I liked that it wasn’t more than looking at pictures and commenting if you wanted. I don’t need or want worlds to collide, and if they do, I want it to be a choice. For instance, I have this blog, and I post on twitter. I decided I didn’t want my tweets to be published here or for there to be a link. I like that I can choose. Yahoo’s force into Flickr takes the choice away. I don’t have to participate in anything, but now they know where I live, they’re making connections I didn’t sign up for, and I don’t like how it feels. Should I have broken up with Flickr before it was too late?
Admittedly, as much as social networks appeal to others, they make me uncomfortable perhaps because of how they insist on categorizing and defining oneself and others you interact with. I just want to say, “Hey man, my mama never taught me how to cook, that’s why I’m so skinny” and leave it at that.
I was hooked on Flickr but dragged my feet in “managing” my account in response to the red-text warnings I’d see whenever I went to the site, and were sent to my mintjelly email account (forwarded seemlessly to gmail, thank you). Already I was having negative Yahoo associations.
Finally, I went to Yahoo to do some cleanup, who was launching a new everything as part of their Yahoo! 360. The redesign and re-engineering of their mail was introduced by way of an animated interactive tutorial that would have given everyone a big thrill back in the day. For that reason I was interested, and took some screen shots, for posterity. If I had to describe it, I’d say the tutorial works exactly the way non technical people want “the computer” to work. Instead of managing expectations, Yahoo just took about 8 or so years to give it to them.
I’m not trying to poo-poo the good things that yahoo is doing, nor am I forgetting that they were a wacky startup once upon a time and I don’t begrudge them taking over the world. One day Google and Yahoo will rumble, and there will be a 2.0 future predictions website or two who’ll monitor that, and all will be as per usual on the World Wild West. I just hope there’s never a winner, and I hope there are always startups and upstarts.
For realz though, if the prices weren’t so good and if the variety weren’t so ridiculous (carnivorous plants!), I’d avoid Amazon like the plague, solely on principle for not letting me delete old addresses and change my email address for so long. It’s easy now, as part of the subtle site enhancement I’ve noticed, their help section has really rounded out. It’s now so easy and obvious, it makes me doubt myself. Was it always possible?
Have I had the power all along, and only had to be ready to click my sparkling shoes? Did I somehow subconsciously want to see all those old apartments signifying good and bad choices, my old married name? No. I don’t. I didn’t. Definitely not. And in my human opinion, it was rude and stupid of Amazon to remind me every time I wanted to shop their site. Amazon has a wacky side project going, called Mechanical Turk, where processes (decisions) that are supposed to be performed by computers are being made by people. I assume it’s so humans can infer what makes sense to show and not show, keep and not keep.
Experiencing this passively gauche treatment has made me more understanding, more merciful to myself and others with regard to what should be left in the past. It’s made me see how it feels to be reminded of how much one might want to distance themselves from previous stupidity and mistakes, weak moments, bad spells, good intentions, and plans gone wrong. I don’t want to be reminded of mine anymore. Sure, it was “me” and they helped make the me that I am today but it wasn’t ever made with the full consideration of all of me or all I am now.
I feel like tools wouldn’t get to know you that well no matter how much data is fed them. But with what they do have, they draw a cartoon. And to a marketer, a business, or a lawmaker, that’s enough.
I had a shock last week when I visited a tiny little independent website called Well Told Tales and checked out their podcasts. As I scrolled to the bottom I was startled to see, “Hello Victoria, would you like to contribute to our site?”. Victoria is what Amazon called me before I told them I prefer to go by “Mia.” Only my father and telemarketers call me Victoria. Mia is my middle name, no one ever called me Victoria. I wouldn’t jump if you yelled it. Except online.
I clicked the “how do we know your name?” link explaining that this was a new service “the Amazon honor system” so that people could easily donate. But why do I want Amazon to know what other websites I go to and like enough to support? And now I’m caught between liking the little guy and fueling the big guy until the little guy is something the big guy wants to buy, I suppose. No sir, I don’t like it, especially the name “honor system”. Is it cheating” if I’m reading a free website for free?
Online identities and the tools they’re attached to (email, shopping, sharing — these things are supposed to be our tools, for us) are born to expire, they fit us at the time, and the big problem on the user’s end is that the trail of bread we leave isn’t eaten by birds.
People develop and change even while remaining constant. Maybe online identity handling will get smarter when the tools stop trying to figure out if people move in waves or particles. Though I think it’s not so much the clever things it can do that we’re all thinking more about, but the big issues regarding the intelligence gathered and shared beyond our initial expectations.
The subtle, sensitive discomfort we feel when our identities are traded and roughly handled might be our own little coal-mine canary alerting us when the air’s going bad.
If Amazon knew how I felt, I’m sure they’d try to sell me a gas mask and a cage for my bird.
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