After careful consideration and a few incidents I have witnessed and was not impressed with, the Parlor will be reducing additional presence on social media for the time being. Public social media, that is.
I have been researching and monitoring the situation for several months now. Social media seems to be...a mess. Many of you are no doubt subscribers of Anne Rice's Facebook page, as well as her son, Christopher Rice. He has been keeping Anne's page going and preserving her legacy in addition to his own work as a novelist and podcaster. Recently, though, as we have all seen, there has been a mystifying proliferation of some exceptionally nauseating spam.
Many Facebook pages and groups of any and all descriptions have been hit with this problem. Despite numerous and repeated reports of this spam, the problem continues. Even groups I have been a member of for years have been hit with this problem, and have had no alternative other than to set the groups to private. Christopher Rice was put in the same position and has created a private Facebook group for fans to interact without being hit with massive amounts of spam.
Let me be clear: while I might have some things I believe social media platforms are falling far short of as far as making their platforms safe and responding to the concerns of all who use them, I don't think they are inherently useless. Social media has the potential to do a lot of good in the world, but the responsibility to maintain the ability to do that good is not solely in the hands of the users or the platform. So as much as I urge those who use social media to do so responsibly and respectfully, I urge the platforms themselves to uphold their equal part of this responsibility.
The Parlor does have a Facebook group that was put together but I have not really put focus on it much as other things have taken up my time. It is, at the moment, a public group.
HOWEVER.
I am seriously considering making the group private. My initial look into this did tell me one thing: once a Facebook group is changed from public to private, it cannot be changed back to public. A new public group would have to be set up. For those of you considering this change, I advise you to consider the decision very carefully before you make this change.
For the Parlor, this decision is one that has to be made with the needs of its guests in mind. In the last several months, I removed the ability to view the Parlor's Guestbook on the main website for the first time ever. The site is 15 years old, so that's saying something.
However, the purpose of the Parlor is not only to discuss Anne Rice's Lives of the Mayfair Witches in depth, but to help preserve Anne's extraordinary literary legacy. It pleases me to no end that manuscripts and other materials of Anne's related to her work have been preserved in collections, such as the one at Tulane University. Hey, THERE'S a new section to add: where researchers may access these collections.
A lot of people have grown wary of social media in recent years with good reason. They are not comfortable discussing even the things they enjoy on social media because of concerns related to privacy, cyberstalking, bullying, harassment, and so much more. On YouTube, you will see from time to time people mentioning the groups of creators who upload content about knitting--KNITTING, of all things. That is how bad it's gotten for people who just want to connect with others who share the same interests.
I remember some of Anne's posts regarding abusive Internet trolls who would show up on her Facebook page. "Just jog on". The concerns are enough that I am seriously considering making the Parlor's own Facebook group private and making some of the Parlor's content available only in the group if I make the group private.
If fans of Anne Rice, of the Mayfair Witches and Vampire Chronicles who enjoy visiting the Parlor to learn more would be more comfortable interacting in a private Facebook group rather than a public group, then that is what I am going to do.
As I write this, I might do the same with the Parlor Chat and Site Updates. It was always my intention that this feature would eventually become interactive as its name implies. Now just might be the time to finally make that happen. The potential need to do so in a private group of some sort is a new idea, but that is the reality of social media now as opposed to 15 or even 10 years ago.
Yes, I think that would be a very good idea...
