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2. Informed: “I Don't Know. I Gotta Get the Best One”

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2. Informed: “I Don't Know. I Gotta Get the Best One” Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 2. Informed: “I Don’t Know. I Gotta Get the Best One” Joseph Reagle Published on: Apr 08, 2019 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 2. Informed: “I Don’t Know. I Gotta Get the Best One” Being a consumer is like a job. You have to make sure you get the best one. If you get a Blu-ray player, you gotta do research.… You gotta go on Amazon and read a really long review written by an insane person who’s been dead for months … because he shot his wife and then himself after explaining to you that the remote is counter-intuitive. “It’s got really small buttons on the remote,” he said … before he murder-suicided his whole family. And now you’re reading it and going, “I don’t know. I don’t know which one to get, I don’t know. I gotta get the best one.” Who are you, the King of Siam, that you should get the best one ever? Who cares? They’re all the same, these machines. They’re all made from the same Asian suffering. There’s no difference. —Louis C.K., “Late Show: Part 1,” Louie, season 3, episode 10, August 30, 2012 Despite the name, Boston’s Micro Center isn’t small—nor is it in Boston. It is, instead, an electronics supermarket on the Cambridge shore of the Charles River. It attracts customers from all over eastern Massachusetts, but I live a few minutes away. Once, while browsing the aisles, I came across an inexpensive accessory for my camera. I wasn’t happy with the included strap and for a mere $6 this one would give me added security against dropping it. But was it any good? I left my phone at home, and so in a quiet corner I found an online laptop and quickly pulled up Amazon. The strap could be had for a few dollars less and, more importantly, it had a few decent reviews: it’s not a lemon. Good, except that a sales associate looked over my shoulder and asked if I needed any help. Embarrassed, I explained that I will indeed be buying the product and was only checking the reviews. Even when I plan to purchase something in a store, I feel uneasy about buying blind. With Amazon’s “Price Check” app on my phone, a quick photo of a bar code reveals all. As a reviewer of the application noted, “I use this app not for price (unless a huge difference), but to check the product review. It’s so handy! I can avoid buying things [the] amazon community doesn’t give a stamp of approval.” In fact, a third of surveyed adult cell phone owners said that they used their devices to look up reviews and prices while in a store during the 2011 holiday shopping season.1 Such people likely include maximizers, a term popularized by Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice. Whereas a satisficer can settle for good enough, maximizers must be assured that every decision is optimal.2 They spend hours reading reviews and feel disappointed when an item falls short of expectations or is surpassed by a new model. They suffer from the fear that they could have made a better decision; this is the paradox of increased information and choice. 2 Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 2. Informed: “I Don’t Know. I Gotta Get the Best One” © 2012 xkcd.com/1036 CC-BY-NC 2.5 Today maximizers have an extraordinary amount of information available to them. Sites like Yelp and Amazon offer ratings in the form of stars. These ratings can be accompanied by reviews that are often haphazard but sometimes astoundingly detailed. Reviews can be professional, such as those in Consumer Reports, or amateur, such as those at Yelp, Amazon, and everywhere else on the Web. Because confidence correlates with large numbers, some sites distill the ratings, such as Rotten Tomatoes’ “freshness” percentage, Yelp’s average rating, and Amazon’s histogram. A bimodal distribution in which most ratings are either zero or five stars is a sign of controversy. Reviews themselves can be reviewed as “helpful” and commented upon. Forums and lists provide additional ways for people to discuss and perhaps even form a community. Unsure of the quality of tangible goods, reviewers can view photos and videos of products. On YouTube, these reviews serve as a way for reviewers to fashion their identity as a helpful expert (for example, with comments such as “This is my favorite mascara and here are my application tips”) or conspicuous consumer (“Let’s drop test the latest gadget”). This information is varied and rich but it is not novel simply because it appears on the screen. An essential function of comment is to inform: we express our thoughts for the benefit of others, and others seek them out to understand and make decisions. As noted in chapter 1, we have been gossiping about each other for a long time, and we can even understand gossip as a part of what makes us human. Similarly, the desire to comment on a written text is as old as writing. As soon as humans began writing, our scribbles have been a source of confusion and contention and have necessitated commentary. Perhaps the earliest instance of this is the Babylonians’ dictionaries of Sumerian. Yet we have needed help with more than just foreign languages. Because early writing lacked many of the conveniences that we take for granted today—such as vowels, punctuation, and spaces between words —the ancients needed help in deciphering their cherished texts. Hence, they developed conventions for annotating these works and these (also ancient) annotations are known as scholia.3 Tom Standage’s 2013 book Writing on the Wall: Social Media—the First Two Thousand Years is a delightful corrective for our myopic tendency to think that the new is necessarily novel. For instance, the Romans 3 Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 2. Informed: “I Don’t Know. I Gotta Get the Best One” wrote on their friends’ walls (literally), and Martin Luther “went viral” thanks to the extraordinary information technology of the day: the printing press. Pope Leo X likened the spread of Luther’s protests to a “plague and cancerous disease.”4 When considering reviews (comments that inform people), it is also worthwhile to consider the past. So I begin this journey to the bottom of the Web with a brief historical excursion. Many books have been written about criticism and review, but I suffice with a brief discussion of what is most often seen online, touching on the origins of the review, gold stars, likers, the crowd, and the critics now found on the Web. This discussion is from the perspective of a gadget addict who also is addicted to gadget reviews. For example, as a maximizer, I spend far too much time in search of the perfect product and often guiltily recall comedian Louis C.K.’s question: “Who are you, the King of Siam, that you should get the best one ever?” Reviews have been around for a while now, but never before were they so accessible that we’d regret our purchase the next day upon reading someone else’s comment. The Review When buying a camera, the new owner is advised to read the manual and, if overwhelmed and confused by the manual, to purchase another guide (sometimes called a “missing manual”) with more detailed instructions about how to use the gadget’s many functions. That is, an expert is needed to help the user to decipher and apply the product’s manual. Photographer Gary L. Friedman, for example, sells ebooks with “professional insights.” These texts are a hybrid of a professional review and user guide. Content seemingly calls forth even more content, which is a recurrent theme in the history of media. During the Enlightenment, cloistered scholars slaving over the annotation of ancient authorities gave way to the likes of John Locke, Voltaire, and Isaac Newton; new thoughts and works abounded. However, the glut of work from lesser thinkers led Gottfried Leibniz, Newton’s contemporary and fellow inventor of calculus, to complain of the “horrible mass of books that keeps on growing.” He feared that there would be no end “to books continuing to increase in number,” and he was right.5 By the eighteenth century, print’s proliferation called into being new forms of commentary—ironically, more print—that we now take for granted. The seventeenth century’s comprehensive indexes and collections of abstracts were followed by more discriminating reviews in the eighteenth century. The French Encyclopédie and other reference works are illustrative of a new reading public and their desire to have the mass of knowledge made sensible and accessible. Although some might not view reference works as commentary, early reference work compilers were an opinionated bunch. In Dennis de Coetlogon’s A Universal History of Arts and Sciences (1745), the “Geography” article begins with the 4 Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 2. Informed: “I Don’t Know. I Gotta Get the Best One” nation of France because it is “the first in rank” and “the most fertile, the most agreeable, and the most powerful in Europe.”6 Print’s proliferation accompanied the emergence of a new class of wealthy literates, including merchants and bankers. As chronicled by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the new bourgeois, this “reading public,” constituted a “public sphere” in which all topics were discussed without deference to the authority of the ancients or of contemporary rulers.
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