But then, along came everybody. When did it begin? Perhaps 2008? I remember looking over an advertisement for a play I had reviewed, idly wondering if I’d been quoted in its list of accolades, and I narrowed my eyes instead at a hyperenthusiastic comment that was credited to a certain local blog (how gross, it seemed, to print a Web site address beneath a rave instead of the hallowed, italicized title of a magazine or broadsheet). This struck me as disturbing—maybe even a little disgusting—because that blogger had no authority backing his opinion, and therefore, what was the value of it? Who cared what this mouth breather thought about the play? My naïveté went hand in hand with my hypocrisy; there was no real reason why my own opinion mattered, except that it appeared in the Globe. It was symptomatic of my own frail position that I felt threatened by online usurpers.
In the case of arts reviews and restaurant reviews, social media and blogs have more or less blown up opinion monopolies. Even while Google and Facebook use intense data mining to monopolize certain kinds of knowledge (kinds useful to advertisers), we also get a proliferation of amateur judgment. The new technology “frees up” the voices of more people, even while it standardizes and controls other kinds of information.
This isn’t a new dynamic. For example, while the printing press’s most famous child may be the sacred and authoritative Gutenberg Bible, it also allowed, as Elizabeth Eisenstein notes, for
the duplication of the hermetic writings, the sibylline prophecies, the hieroglyphics of “Horapollo,” and many other seemingly authoritative, actually fraudulent esoteric writings [that worked] in the opposite direction, spreading inaccurate knowledge.
Benighted medieval worldviews were, in a sense, more available to the literary set of the sixteenth century than they had been to those in the medieval world. (Porn, too, of course; someone ought to write a good book on the explosion of pornography that Gutenberg’s invention ignited.) Historians are fond of saying that the printing press eventually gave rise to the clean rationalism of the Enlightenment (and it did), but the machine was indiscriminate and had no particular fondness for the writings of Newton and Voltaire; it was just as good at spreading backward or “immoral” information as forward or “noble” stuff.
• • • • •
By the late 1800s, newspapers opened “correspondence columns” that allowed everyday readers to turn into writers. “The distinction between writer and readership is thus in the process of losing its fundamental character,” worried critical theorist Walter Benjamin. “The reader is constantly ready to become a writer,” he noted, adding that literary authority had become (shudder) “common property.”
After that first occasion when I saw a blogger’s words running alongside those of “professional” critics, it was of course as though a dam had broken. Today, press agents regularly give one-person Web sites complimentary tickets to shows in the hopes of eliciting positive buzz. House managers, while asking guests to turn off their cell phones during a performance, implore them to turn those phones back on during intermission and tweet about what fun they’re having. Five years after I first noticed the shift, my friends and I declare a movie a good bet because of crowdsourced ratings. We’ll choose one pizza place over another while bumming around Seattle because someone shows us a Yelp page on their phone (we meanwhile roll our eyes at the in-person recommendation of some crank at the hotel). And as I’ve watched my friends become more reliant on amateur or algorithmic critiques, I’ve seen them also become amateur critics themselves, seen them eagerly feed the data banks of Yelp and Amazon. Once we get a taste of that sense of enlargement, of mastery over (or at least interaction with) the ocean of information, everybody becomes a pundit. Should we be worried?
• • • • •
When the elitist-ly named (but Pulitzer Prize–winning) William A. Henry III wrote his most famous book, In Defense of Elitism, he took to bemoaning how “the dominant mood of contemporary American culture is the self-celebration of the peasantry.” Harsh, yes. At times, the text (written in 1994, just before the “peasantry” got its hands on the “self-celebrating” genius of the Internet) is unabashedly snobbish in its desire to separate the supposed wheat from the supposed chaff. But the elitist impulse is worth looking at a second time because it highlights a position—which is the absence of opinion, the scarcity of opinion—that we chucked when we went online. And that lack of opinion is something we aren’t often encouraged to remember. However, if you believe that some opinions are in fact better than others, then you, too, are an elitist of sorts. I remember reading In Defense of Elitism at nineteen, with the same sense of shameful transgression that gripped earlier generations when they perused Playboy. This was the turn of the millennium, and my university friends were a leftist bunch who would’ve raised more than their eyebrows at me if they caught me reading anyone “the third.” Once I said to a particularly severe woman in our group, “Teak furniture is so much nicer than pine,” and she wouldn’t speak to me for a week.
What would poor William Henry III think of the way I select movies and music online? Instead of seeking suggestions from trusted critics, I browse selections that Netflix offers up “because you watched Legally Blonde.” (The triviality, the casualness, of our interests and predilections bounce back at us to a sometimes painful extent.) These are algorithmically derived options, based on movies that other people who watched Legally Blonde have enjoyed. They are, then, a kind of computerized judgment of their own—a digital version of “Oh, this would be your kind of thing.” And more often than not, I’m a little insulted by the portrait of my viewing habits that Netflix tries to paint—and tries to reinscribe. (One friend of mine, David, complains that Google AdSense “treats me like a forty-three-year-old woman because of my personal choices.”)
We can presume that in the future much more will be selected by public consensus—and that we’ll be vaguely unaware of those selections, too. The computer scientist (and virtual reality pioneer) Jaron Lanier writes angrily against this “invisible hand” in Who Owns the Future?:
If market pricing is the only legitimate test of quality, why are we still bothering with proving theorems? Why don’t we just have a vote on whether a theorem is true? To make it better we’ll have everyone vote on it, especially the hundreds of millions of people who don’t understand the math. Would that satisfy you?
This invisible hand is at work each time you search online. When Google delivers your search results, its algorithm (mimicking an academic tradition) assumes that work that receives more citations has a greater authority. Google, then, privileges search results that are linked to more Web pages and shuttles more popular (that is, relevant) results to page one of the 142 million results for “Glee,” for example. Nicholas Carr tells a fascinating story in The Shallows that illustrates where this approach can go drastically wrong: James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, compiled a database of thirty-four million scholarly articles published in journals from 1945 to 2005, in order to assess the number and variety of citations that were used. Had the movement of journals from print to online been a boon for scholarship?
As more journals moved online, scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before. . . . Scholars cited more recent articles with increasing frequency. A broadening of available information led, as Evans described it, to a “narrowing of science and scholarship.”
The Google-ization of knowledge—that ultimate searchability—creates a great bounty of potential avenues for research. It cannot, however, become a substitute for the strange vagaries of human intuition and creative leaps. We need to insist on a certain randomness, and a large degree of pure, haphazard discovery, in the tools we use to explore our world. The brightest moments of human discovery are those unplanned and random instants when you thumb through a strange book in a foreign library or talk auto maintenance with a neuroanatomist. We need our searches to include cross-wiring and dumb accidents, too, not just algorithmic surety.
And b
esides the need for accidental connections, there’s the fact that some things, clearly, are beyond the wisdom of crowds—sometimes speed and volume should bend to make way for theory and meaning. Sometimes we do still need to quiet down the rancor of mass opinion and ask a few select voices to speak up. And doing so in past generations has never been such a problem as it is for us. They never dealt with such a glut of information or such a horde of folk eager to misrepresent it.
• • • • •
I’m as guilty in all this, as complicit, as the next guy. Looking up a book I’m interested in on Amazon, I can’t help noticing that it’s the 390,452nd best seller available and that “Josie from Phoenix” thought it was “so boring I threw it across the room.” Every product on Amazon—from biscuit tins to baby toys to laptops—comes with its own sales ranking and its own appendage of public opinion. Meanwhile, when a business is too small to manage its own Web site, Yelp often feels like the only way to find its address and phone number; it’s a Yellow Pages for people who don’t care about Yellow Pages anymore.
Yelp’s user base has become quite a mass indeed. When the Web site launched in 2004, it welcomed a modest 300,000 users per month. A few years later, in 2008, that number climbed to 15.7 million users per month. By 2011, the number hit 65.8 million. The curve is not linear; it’s verging on exponential: In 2013, Yelp enticed 117 million unique users per month. As of this writing, “Yelpers” have written 47 million reviews of local businesses around the world (mostly restaurants and shops), all entirely without pay. Every second of every day, a Yelp user either receives directions to a business or makes a call to a business through the Web site’s mobile app.
The reviews themselves are often insipid or thoughtless, yet their value for those businesses is undeniable. A study published in Economic Journal found that when a restaurant’s Yelp rating was bumped by just half a star, it correlated with an increased number of patrons, even while all other factors (price, quality of food, service) remained constant. This naturally leads many businesses to create false enthusiastic reviews in an effort to sway public opinion, or at least sway public wallets. Perhaps the surest sign of a Yelp review’s significance is the vehemence it can inspire: A restaurateur in Ottawa’s famous ByWard Market, for example, was found guilty of libel and sent to jail after she launched an aggressive Internet smear campaign targeted at the author of a critical review.
It’s this devotion to, and obsession with, a flattened critical world—one where amateurism and self-promotion take the place of the “elite” critical voices we once relied upon—that leads writers like Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur) to baldly state: “Today’s internet is killing our culture.” We get mob opinion instead of singular voices; crowdsourced culture. Consider the Unbound Publishing project, which democratizes the selection of which books get written. Authors pitch ideas to users, who then choose whether or not to fund the writing of said books. “Books are now in your hands,” enthuses the Web site. This sounds like a splendid way to produce top-rate Twilight porn (and I tip my hat to the creators of such best sellers), but what is the spectrum of books that such an approach will produce, and what sort does it cancel out?
We’ve proceeded this far with the belief that the broadcasting of our voices is a positive—and certainly it can be—but now our job is to temper that belief with a second question: Might we suffer from opinion glut?
• • • • •
In my years as a critic for various papers, I’ve reviewed visual art, opera, chamber music, dance, books, and theater. And what I’ve heard from my fellow critics—during intermission at concert halls or filing out of some independent theater—is a resounding condemnation of the new critical order. “These fucking bloggers,” one music writer said to me at a cocktail event, “they swoop in and gobble up all the advertisers, pumping out totally uninformed, shittily written drivel. It just makes me wonder why I even bother doing research or interviews.” Another veteran critic—from the theater beat—was resigned to the fact that “every time the Internet expands, my job gets smaller. There’s less and less space for theater reviews in the paper. Or paid theater reviews, anyway.” Another simply noted: “God, I mean, you read these reviews online and they don’t, you know, even know how to use apostrophes. Don’t people care that they’re reading stuff written by people lacking a basic grasp of the language?” When everyone becomes an expert, the old experts fade away.
Professional critics have their uses, though—we can aggregate them. Web sites like Rotten Tomatoes (with ten million unique users visiting each month) use masses of data, a crowd of critical reviews, to create an average star rating for films. For reasons best left unexplored, I wrote a review in The Globe and Mail of Uwe Boll’s 2008 debacle, Postal, and Rotten Tomatoes has been using my grouchy opinion of the film ever since. (Naturally, I’ve not received a penny.) While it might be informative to know that 124 reviews of the Vince Vaughn comedy The Internship could be mashed down into a single sulking number—it got 34 percent on Rotten Tomatoes—what does such an aggregation mean for the livelihoods of the critics whose work has been the fodder for the Web site? Who would pay to read a single critic’s work when it’s already been processed by such a godly and free-of-charge algorithm? Our generation seems to be facing a crisis of critique. We want to know what’s best, we want to know where to eat and what movie to see, but we’ve begun to forget that real opinion, real critique, must always come out of an absence of voices—from a singular subjective viewpoint. You cannot aggregate taste. But in the flood of rating systems and collectivized percentage values, which guide us toward TV shows on Netflix or songs on iTunes, we don’t register the loss of that less aggressive suggestion system we always relied on before: face-to-face encounters and singular critics.
I was surprised to find a sympathetic listener in Matt Atchity, editor in chief over at Rotten Tomatoes. I told him I don’t love the idea of aggregating critical opinion, saying, “In some ways it’s anathema to the whole point of criticism, since it strips the critic of a subjective voice.” And Atchity told me, “My worry about that is the one thing that keeps me up at night.” I asked him how he thought of his own role in critical debates, and he told me his job is to amass the best opinions in the country for his millions of readers. “Sometimes I feel like I’m the town crier,” he told me. “I feel like I’m a herald.” Atchity may have good intentions, but the aggregation and flattening of critics still continues at Rotten Tomatoes.
Shall we engineer instead a kind of critical vacuum, an artificial absence of voices, in which comprehensible and highly subjective opinions can prosper?
Perhaps we’ll get more of a critic vacuum from companies like Songza, the music-streaming Web site that delivers playlists curated by experts (and occasionally celebrities, from Justin Bieber to New York City’s former mayor Mike Bloomberg). Songza is founded on a simple enough premise: If there are twenty-four million songs on the shelf, people become baffled by the panoply of content and fall back on the few songs they already know; access to everything encourages exploration of nothing. Songza’s job is to ask you what you’re in the mood for (taking a sunny stroll? preparing for bedtime?) and then introduce you to music you didn’t know you wanted for the occasion. It’s an approach that’s working. On any given day, seventy million minutes of activity are logged on Songza. I spoke with the company’s cofounder Elias Roman, a twenty-nine-year-old wunderkind from Queens who’s found his way onto the Forbes “30 Under 30” list. I admit I was relieved to hear his ideas about the future of music. “Some things are easy to crowdsource,” he told me, “but when you’re interested in constructing a playlist, a coherent whole, it’s more than just aggregating a bunch of binaries. I’m saying that there is a value to tastemaking.”
Tastemaking? The very term sounded antique, wonderfully elitist, coming from the founder of a digital start-up. “We have a desire here to be tastemakers,” he continued. “While our algorithms will sometimes offer music t
hat a user has chosen in the past, we have a mandate that the site always brings forward songs you don’t know you want yet. There’s always going to be both comfort food and something surprising.”
Roman’s insistence on tastemaking flies in the face of most content providers, who seek only to gratify the known desires of users. And it’s an impulse that could go a long way toward countering something that Internet activist Eli Pariser has coined “the filter bubble.”
Here’s how a filter bubble works: Since 2009, Google has been anticipating the search results that you’d personally find most interesting and has been promoting those results each time you search, exposing you to a narrower and narrower vision of the universe. In 2013, Google announced that Google Maps would do the same, making it easier to find things Google thinks you’d like and harder to find things you haven’t encountered before. Facebook follows suit, presenting a curated view of your “friends’” activities in your feed. Eventually, the information you’re dealing with absolutely feels more personalized; it confirms your beliefs, your biases, your experiences. And it does this to the detriment of your personal evolution. Personalization—the glorification of your own taste, your own opinion—can be deadly to real learning. Only if sites like Songza continue to insist on “surprise” content will we escape the filter bubble. Praising and valuing those rare expert opinions may still be the best way to expose ourselves to the new, the adventurous, the truly revelatory.
• • • • •
Commensurate with the devaluing of expert opinion is the hypervaluing of amateur, public opinion—for its very amateurism. Often a comment field will be freckled with the acronym IMHO, which stands for the innocuous phrase “in my honest opinion” (or, alternatively, “in my humble opinion”). It crops up when someone wishes to say anything with impunity and has become the “get out of jail free” card of public debate. “IMHO Mexicans should learn to speak proper English if they’re going to work in our restaurants.” Can’t touch me! Just my opinion!
The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection Page 9