exactly. They have become much more accessible. (Although, of course, the people who choose to engage with authors and publishers in social networking forms is a much smaller percentage of the reading public than we like to pretend, but even so, that community is now accessible to those who aren't part of the small-s salon society.)

I suspect you are right about reticence in response. But even beyond the less reticence about response, it means that the office of them hopping online and yelling at a friend of mine are much higher. The odds of me knowing a New York Times literary critic or smaller than the odds of me knowing somebody in an online social network who reads the same books that I do. And that's what's hurting me now: not that authors are being wanky, but that they are lashing out at people I consider friends, or people I respect and wish were my friends.

In some sense, it's just that old conflation of friendship and business, another example of the maxim that you shouldn't do business with your friends. If authors are people in my social circle then I can be angry at them just like I can be angry at anyone else in my social circle, which conflicts with my desires not to purchase things from people I'm angry at, and to see art out of the context of my personal feelings about the author.
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