This hasn’t happened to me before, but recently I stumbled across a blog on the secret lives of well known British and Hollywood actors posted on my blog site – except it wasn’t from me! It was an article about the private and somewhat seedy lives of Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and others in their cohort. On closer inspection, the article seemed to be a machine-generated “cut and paste job,” taking strings of data from or about this rather poorly rated (on Goodreads) book titled Damn you, Scarlett O’Hara: The Private Lives of Vivien Leigh and Lawrence Olivier by Darwin Porter and Roy Moseley and creating some sort of a review, replete with pictures, video and sub headings. The sentence structure was noticeably garbled and the only things that stuck out were the juicy references to some of the salacious acts these famous actors had indulged in. The title of the blog was even more ridiculous: How To Begin a Writing Career.
I soon discovered that the imposter had not only snapped this ridiculous article on my property but he (or she) had changed my passwords and shut me out of my own site, a site I had cultivated over many years as a place for well thought out articles and book reviews, with no advertizing to support it; it had been my volunteer contribution to literature, and now it was despoiled.
Several thoughts ran through my head. First, I felt violated. I thought that the authors of this book were taking cheap cracks at promoting their work via sites that featured quality reviews and articles. But then I also wondered: were the perpetrators the authors of this book themselves or was it someone who had decided to play a trick on me? Has anyone taken machine-assembled reviews of my books and plastered on them on other blog sites to my discredit? There were embedded links in the article that suggested some advertising of essay writing services that I dared not click onto lest I be taken to another limbo. I recalled seeing these links on another syndicated news site where these “floggers,” as I have labeled them, had shown up and practically overrun the site with their gobbledygook, rendering that site unworkable and unsuitable for anyone looking for credible editorial. I had protested to that site’s owner, and like Jesus driving the greedy merchants from the temple, he reacted and that site has now been (almost) cleaned up. And now, were the floggers visiting me in revenge? I also looked at the positive side: someone must be reading my articles otherwise I couldn’t have become a target. The only comfort I could take from this episode was to conclude that anyone familiar with my writing would quickly recognize that even though I am a colonial with a different language rhythm, I do not write broken English. I hoped my readers would ignore this crap.
Whatever the motive, a few facts stand out for me. (1) If floggers are able to make a living from this activity, they must indeed be selling to a low level of reading populace (2) If people are actually reading this stuff they must be reading for keywords and not for structure, coherence of thought, and elegance of language (3) If there is no constant vigilance, we will let the internet sink into a Tower of Babel, allowing for the privateers who have being trying to control it for a long time have their proof that gated communities work best.
As for me, my site was cleaned up, passwords restored and tightened into unbreakable combinations. and I will continue to seek quality in my writing and send a message to the floggers in a couple of keywords that they will surely recognize: “Up Yours!”