Deep Diving in the Social Media Dumpster? No, thank you.

[lizvogel]

I've been pondering this post for a while now:

Janet Reid, Literary Agent: Getting Ready to Query? Clean up your social media.

Based on what I know of Ms. Reid, I doubt she's screening for anything other than really egregious asshattery. (As, indeed, she has clarified in a follow-up post.) But I also think it's a terribly dangerous precedent: once you ask creatives (or anyone, really) to self-censor the big things, the not-quite-so-big things will look bigger for the lack of contrast, and when they're gone the medium-sized things will loom larger, and so on, until ultimately you're running scared from people who might get offended by the word "the". And of course, as people get more and more bent about smaller and smaller things, tomorrow's cancel-culture shitstorm is today's perfectly innocuous remark. So maybe you'd better not make that remark, or any remark at all, eh? Just sit silently and let the right-thinking people dominate the social narrative.

And to explicitly link cowering from the torch-bearing mob (because that's what this is, really) to one's chances of finding representation, of having a writing career...? I know publishing is a business, not a moral crusade, but I expected better, I really did.

I recommend reading both the post and the comments. There are some eloquent objections in there to sanitizing one's entire persona out of fear of cancel culture overreactions, not to mention the intractable challenge of trying to guess what someone, somewhere, somewhen is going to take exception to.

As for my own journal, I really doubt there's anything all that exciting in here anyway. But after reading those comments, I feel the need to take my tiny little bit of a stand, so:

Dear agents: I am not scrubbing my social media. This is me. If that's not going to work for you, best we find out now, eh?

Comments

[duskpeterson]

I wish she'd said more about what she was afraid of, because her advice could range anything from the standard advice of "If you're a professional author, act professionally on social media" to "Don't post anything that the censors might not like!" There's a big difference between those two types of advice.

[lizvogel]

I think it's fairly clear from the follow-up post that she's talking about what the censors might not like:

"BUT, there's a brand new sport of deep diving into your past that makes the Red Scare of the 50's look like a walk in the park."

Now, I think JR herself means that time ten years ago when a poster might have misread the line between "take a stand but don't be an ass-hat". But that reference to McCarthyism isn't in there by accident. And even in the original post, she makes a distinction between what she used to do, which was pretty much the standard screening for unprofessional behavior, and what she's doing now, which is screening for anything that might get author+agent into "hot water".

The fact that the agent herself can't define specifically what she's looking for, because what might get you into hot water changes daily and depends entirely on what the person attacking you thinks they can get mileage out of, IMNSHO only demonstrates exactly how ridiculous the situation has gotten.

[duskpeterson]

There's a thread circulating on Twitter right now, from a lesbian mom, talking about all the steps she's taking to essentially go back into the closet, as far as she's able. I think there's a lot of fear at the moment.

Oddly enough, the fear seems to be throughout the political spectrum. Before the pandemic, my county (60% Republican, 40% Democrat) held gatherings where county residents from a wide variety of backgrounds could get to know each other. We could use more of that.

[lizvogel]

Yeah, "attack first and don't bother asking questions" seems to be a fully multi-partisan activity, sadly.

That gathering sounds great. We definitely need more of that sort of thing.