Carrie Callahan

The "Powered By Amazon" writing community, WriteOn announced today that it will be closing as of March 22nd--a little over two years after initially opening to writers. The platform opened on March 11, 2014 and was meant to be Amazon's answer to Wattpad. I think it's easy to get caught up in feeling that Amazon is unfair or cruel for taking away the community it had only started to build--and maybe it is, on some level. But I also think that those posting in the forums in anger about the news miss a vital fact about this and every other free online community: they don't owe you anything. This was a free experiment open to writers, and now that experiment is over. We may never get an explanation as to why it's ending so abruptly--but neither do we deserve one. Shops, cafes, and restaurants close all the time when the customer base cannot support their rent--and online spaces are no different. In the past, online communities have simply withered as the ne...

I am not a "digital native," but I am a digital transplant. I only exist online because I put myself here. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I've finally made Facebook , Goodreads , and Amazon author pages for myself. Suddenly, I go from observing to existing. I didn't grow up with a digital self - a crafted version of my personality for cyber country. I didn't have consistent access to the Internet until I was twelve, and I didn't have a cell phone until I was 17. It was a Nokia phone with a background of two colors: black and green. You kids might recognize the color scheme from old fashioned calculators and the LCD clocks you find in thrift store bins. These days, if you don't have a digital self then you don't fully exist in the social sphere. The Internet has become its own universe and social media is where we do the things that used to be limited to shopping malls and night clubs: we walk and talk and flash and greet and...

Net Neutrality, for those unfamiliar, is the idea that all websites should be allowed to the ability to upload/download at whatever rate the viewer has, with the variation being from person to person not website to website. For example, if I have 15mb/s download, then all websites will download at that rate. Now, each website has different content but that content doesn't affect my download rate. This seems like something completely integral to the internet. Until recently, I didn't even know the internet could run differently. So what changed? Some companies - Verizon, AT & T, and Comcast to name a few - want not only to dictate the speeds at which users can download, but the speed at which websites can upload. What does this mean? It means that, regardless of your 15mb/s download, some websites may only be accessible at, say, 3mb/s. So, even though you're paying for access, the website you are accessing might not be. Your access means nada at that point, and if w...