The terrible intimacy of @.

I am so sorry that this happens to you. If you are name-checked in any of my tweets, it's because I'm telling someone how awesome you are, or actually sharing something with you directly.

Name-checking someone because you're complaining about them is very passive-aggressive, and I must admit that I have done it at least once in the past, but it felt horrid and I won't be doing it again.

The @ is definitely weird because it's both a way to identify the person you are referring to on Twitter as well as a way to notify that person that you are talking about them, and you cannot do the former without doing the latter. I totally want to @ authors when I am saying nice things about them, but I wonder, hm, what if I am only giving a four-star review with some critiques? I do want the author to know I really liked the book but do I want them to see where I complain about their overuse of a particular word? I'm not going to @ an author just to pan him or her because that's just rude.

It's an interesting situation, because I think also many people use the @ to be, essentially, a link. "This is who I'm talking about, you can go check them out" type thing, rather than an actual invitation to conversation. To my understanding, a hash-tag (which might be the other option) won't link back to the person, thus not meeting the desired goal.

Or I could be totally wrong, as I'm mostly a social-media luddite who only ventures on Twitter every blue moon or so.

aw yeah this is an interesting conversation because like you I see it as an invitation to respond or include someone in a discussion, a way of tagging them and making sure they see what you're saying. But I have started wondering if people were using it differently lately(as some of these comments suggest), as a way of reference to whoever they are talking to instead of for that person.

In any case, I will never @ someone unless I want them to see what I'm saying!

I really like this post, though, it's very fair!

I personally suspect it's intended as a courtesy in many cases. The person is talking about you, so rather than tweet about you "behind your back" so to speak, they put in the @ so that you may respond if you wish.

As someone who has @ed you in the last week, I really hope I wasn't a contributor to this feeling. I love your work. I want to share your work with my friends. And when I comment on your books' disturbingness, it's with a significant helping of glee (in the YOU ARE NOT PREPARED kind of way).

At any rate: if I've tweeted at you in a way that makes you feel bad, I'm very sorry, and I'll keep it in mind in the future.

This is one of the reasons I don't do Twitter -- I keep remembering what the root word of "twitter" is.

And there are lots of snakes that really love hugs -- pythons and anacondas, for instance. Of course, they like being the ones giving the hugs.

I have a hard time with some of this, as well.

I think some people @msagara, as someone else pointed out, as a kind of pointer/acknowledgement, rather than an attempt to interact. Some people do it because it’s a way of letting other readers know that a particular person *is* on twitter - they’re doing it as a courtesy, not to me, but to people who might be interested in Michelle The Writer who are also on twitter.

I’m from the age of dinosaurs, where I was taught it was absolute poison to interact with reviewers/reviews *at all*.

But some of the reviewers who are younger - like the teen bookbloggers - weren’t raised in that culture; when they link their (mostly positive) reviews, they’re perfectly *happy* to have interaction. Experience with angry authors eventually turns them into the “stay away from reviews” reviewers.

So... I never quite know *how* to respond to positive reviews, because in theory, I’m not supposed to ever respond at all. (These would be the positive reviews with the @ tag. I don’t actually see any other reviews because I find they cause so much anxiety I avoid them. Maybe twice a year, I will put on the big girl pants and go to Google and look for them. Last year was such a stressful writing year that I did it in March. I haven’t looked again.)

I still have no idea how to navigate this one. When somebody reviews my stuff and @'s at me, I feel like they expect me to acknowledge them--why else would they be talking at me? Isn't ignoring them rude?--but there's so many conversations about safe reader space going on, I'm starting to feel that I shouldn't reply.

Fortunately I have not yet received that hate @, which would just confuse my coping mechanisms to know end.

I am in a very different position from yours. That said, I block and mute strangers constantly, because they feel @wednesday is the embodiment of a weekday rather than a person. Even if I wanted to engage with, say, the people who distribute mock RTs saying horrid things, or the ones who had a very bad day, or the frothing hordes of pop star fans who get upset when a video is delayed, I can't -- locked account is locked. (I seem to get the same things on @miercoles, which is open, but I speak no Spanish.) Twitter offers no recourse for this. The attacks aren't personal, see.

So, I'm incredibly sympathetic to having fracas in the mentions.

I almost @ed you earlier today. Not from a review thingy - but because having a reports about zombie fungi and vampire microbes come across my desk always makes me think of you. In a good way, of course.

I do not grok twitter. However every so often I go poke at it, because I am a tech geek, and keep thinking that perhaps I am missing something?
Prior to this post, I would have assumed that twitter was like lj, where it feels like if yo are talking about someone, it is only polite to reference them with their "local" handle. I would not really have considered that @ing someone on twitter would shove my post into their face. And yes, knowing that, it makes absolute sense to me that it would put a person into an awkward position!
I am glad you posted this....I learned something newabout a technology that has evaded my comprehension!

That seems rude, and approaching internet bullying. Some people have No Nice Manners.

*sends hugs and cat snuggles*

Have you ever seen the "celebrities read mean tweets" videos from Kimmel? (I don't watch the show, but I see these when they make the internet rounds...) At any rate, I'm never really sure if the intent of the people who do these things is maliciousness, or simply thoughtlessness

I've absolutely been guilty, many times, of the "Wow candy corn @seananmcguire must be thrilled." (as well as pushing a certain amount of caffeine / pumpkin / cat-related silliness your way on twitter). I have to admit that I'd not fully considered what it would feel like to have a continuous flood of @-mentions bearing down on me with everything from positive reviews to silliness to vociferous disagreement to inchoate ranting.

I'm with you on the terrible intimacy of the @-mention - there's something almost disturbing about how open twitter really is, compared to much of the rest of the internet. I've had a lot of good conversations with people on twitter, but the reality of twitter is that anyone can respond to what I say there. I'm not particularly comfortable with this idea, and I've only had a handful of interactions on twitter that I was unamused by. I treat twitter very differently than I treat other social media (which I've locked down long since) and even differently than I treat the one blog community where I post under my own name. The inherent intimacy of twitter is, to some degree, a feature - but it's also twitter's greatest bug.

I try to treat twitter the way I'd treat actually interacting with the person behind the twitter handle in the real world - if they're a fellow cat person, I'm probably going to still show them cat pictures, but I'm going to try very hard to be a pleasant person to interact with.

I never did like the change Twitter made, at first you only got notified if someone put you at the beginning of their tweet. That way someone could reference someone without them having to read every single mention of them.

I guess some people are too self-centered for that to last.

This is definitely a big problem with how Twitter works. I have just dealt with it by only tweeting authors when I like their stuff. If I write a negative review, I don't use an @. I am mainly just posting it for my followers. I don't feel authors need to know every single feeling I have about their books. I am not their publisher/editor/etc. :)

I always feel a bit awkward submitting a negative review of a novel. A film, fine. It's the work of dozens, if not hundreds of people. It's harder to take it personally, and if I'm particularly angry, it's hard to get personal when any particular aspect is affected by a dozen or more people. If I hate Actor in a movie, I can always say "I wonder what Director told them here" and it still comes down to "I don't like this collaboration." But to me, when I write a review it's more to the author than it is to the readers. That's not to say that I feel authors should live and die by my word or that I in any way discount the people who are wondering whether or not to buy the book, but my moments of joy as a reviewer come from the "thank you so much for telling me what you thought of my book, and for showing me what you struggled with as a reader." Ask any of my friends, those moments when an author (or agent, editor, etc.) makes me feel like my review did something to influence the artistic direction of the world are the ones that put me in a good mood all day and I just can't shut up about them. At the same time, I've been in the position where "I liked this book, but I don't think it's for everyone" resulted in authors and their fans making snide (or outright aggressive) comments toward me and left me in the position where I have to find a way to respond (because looking like I left the room in a tiff because of their comment when I respond to every other comment on the blog would be almost as bad as being nasty myself) without being in the same position as them: someone acting nasty because someone didn't like their work. And, unlike a film, for an author it is their work.

That said, I feel dishonest if I don't address the author and I know how. If I can tell you to your face that I love Book A, I'm not going to go behind your back and tell our mutual "friends" (substitute friends with followers, readers, casual passers-by, what have you) that Book B was terrible. It's a huge load off my conscience to say, "hey, I didn't like Book B, and if you care to say why, here's the link". Of course, if I find I have nothing nice to say to somebody at all, I simply won't speak to them, because that's putting us both in an awkward position. There are some authors I hope never to meet if and when I become published, because of how I feel about what they write. Still, given the opportunity I would still tell that person's editor or agent "these are the problems I had with this work" in the hopes that the feedback will be translated into something that makes a difference.

I can definitely understand how being put in this place is problematic, but I've also been in situations where somebody talked about me on Twitter without tagging me, assuming that because of a piece of work I did I was a drunk driver and deserved to die in a fire. It would have bothered me much less if they had opened a dialogue with me, in which I could have explained "yes that was dumb, no I didn't drive drunk, and you won't see anything like this in the future". Similarly, I am reviewing a piece right now where the author's portrayal of the aftermath of sexual abuse is rather upsetting to me (anybody here who knows me don't look for it any time soon, it's for a blog that is not open yet and is being added to the backlog once it is), and I would feel much more comfortable about the book and my review of it if I got a comment from the author saying "wow, I didn't look at it this way, I wish I had done some research on this type of abuse as I have no personal experience in it". It wouldn't make me like the book, but it would make me respect the author and buy the next thing he wrote.

Just my (slightly rambling) two thoughts, and hopefully the viewpoint here will make it a bit less uncomfortable next time you are linked to such a review.

While I'm commenting here, I've been working on a NaNoWriMo project that your posts on here indicate you might have some interest in, but I imagine you're entirely too busy for people to say "can you comment on my book that's not even written yet?" to you all day. If I'm wrong and you would like to discuss it, I'd be glad any time to stop what I'm doing and send you an outline.

I never tag reviews to you, but I will tweet at someone when their conversation amuses me in some way, and I know I have done that to you. I apologize if that was intrusive.

You make some good points. Twitter does lead to a overinflated sense of intimacy and people don't always stop to think about what they are saying or doing when they @ a person.

I've @ed you with positive reviews and I don't @ authors with reviews that are negative or only meh. I figure you all can find those on your own. :P

I appreciate the fact that you sometimes reply when I send a tweet your way. Your tweetstream must be crazy busy so it's nice when one of my tweets makes it through. :)

Just felt like dropping into this post to tell you that I picked up Rosemary and Rue last Monday, and have since then devoured all of the October books in as few sittings as I could possibly manage. I enjoyed them so much! Thank you for writing them! :D

I use @ both if I'm responding to someone or if I'm talking about them, but I would never do it if I were writing something negative about someone's work--which I don't do anyway, since I rarely want to talk about things I dislike, but the thoughtlessness of it is mind-boggling. I'm sorry you (and presumably just about all authors) have to deal with that.

I didn't know Twitter used to separate those uses until I read the discussion threads here, and I wish they still did it. :/ It just seems to make sense, on top of minimizing the kind of unpleasantness you're talking about.

Either way, I try not to @ you that often, because you don't know me and I get really anxious about flooding your mentions. ^^; (Which, to be absolutely clear, is totally my own anxiety issues, not an implication that you've ever said anything to make me feel that way!)

It seems like it would be more useful to have an explicit symbol-A means I'm talking to someone, symbol-B means I'm talking about someone. Apparently part of the problem was that the situational matching had some issues and could lose some of the talking-to ones as talking-about ones.