Tag Archives: gatekeepers

Killing books with coordinated one-star reviews on Amazon

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I’ve posted before about the wild world of Amazon reviews and here is another example: a group of Michael Jackson fans succeeded in burying a new book about the late pop star.

In the biggest, most overt and most successful of these campaigns, a group of Michael Jackson fans used Facebook and Twitter to solicit negative reviews of a new biography of the singer. They bombarded Amazon with dozens of one-star takedowns, succeeded in getting several favorable notices erased and even took credit for Amazon’s briefly removing the book from sale.

“Books used to die by being ignored, but now they can be killed — and perhaps unjustly killed,” said Trevor Pinch, a Cornell sociologist who has studied Amazon reviews. “In theory, a very good book could be killed by a group of people for malicious reasons.”…

The retailer, like other sites that depend on customer reviews, has been faced with the problem of so-called sock puppets, those people secretly commissioned by an author to produce favorable notices. In recent months, Amazon has made efforts to remove reviews by those it deemed too close to the author, especially relatives.

The issue of attack reviews, though, has received little attention. The historian Orlando Figes was revealed in 2010 to be using Amazon to anonymously vilify his rivals and secretly praise himself. The crime writer R. J. Ellory was exposed for doing the same thing last fall.

This is an interesting world where arguments are being made that people have the right (free speech) to provide harsh and even untrue Amazon reviews.

I don’t envy Amazon for having to deal with this issue where reviews would have to be more closely monitored. Even with close monitoring, people could provide excessively positive or negative reviews as long as they couldn’t be identified as being relatives or bragging out their actions on Facebook (as one member of the Michael Jackson fan group did). It puts Amazon in an unenviable position of having to play the heavy and try to crack down on people.

It would be interesting to see arguments of when these tactics might be supported or praised. Imagine a neo-Nazi writes a book; is it ethical or effective to shut down their book on Amazon? What about an obnoxious political figure on the other side that you can’t stand?

Building beautiful cities

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Architecture critic Edwin Heathcote suggests the beauty in cities is to be found in its ordinary moments.

My first thought is that standards of what is beautiful in cities changes quite a bit over time. Architecture changes. Material conditions change. Culture changes. Buildings go through cycles of acceptance and what might be charming or notable in one city is not so revered elsewhere.

My second thought is that this may be an exercise in gatekeeping: who exactly gets to declare cities or designs as beautiful? Architecture critics, of course, get to do this.

My third thought is that Heathcote may just be right. Much of the attention cities receive tends to come down to particular neighborhoods, like the business core or trendy locations, or particular buildings (like the tallest and/or newest skyscrapers). For example, visitors in Chicago tend to get to see the “greatest hits” including Michigan Avenue, the Loop, the museums, Millennium Park, and other glitzy and well-maintained places meant to project an image. The problem is that most of Chicago doesn’t look like this and the majority of residents are operating in other parts of the city.

An argument for Amazon’s one-star reviews reveals the role of cultural critics

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A professional critic praises Amazon’s one-star reviews:

About a year ago, while shopping online for holiday gifts, I became an unabashed connoisseur of the one-star amateur Amazon review. Here I found the barbed, unvarnished, angry and uncomfortably personal hatchet job very much alive. Indeed, I became so enamored of Amazon’s user-generated reviews of books, films and music that my interest expanded to the one-star notices on Goodreads, Yelp and Netflix, where, for instance, a “Moneyball” review notes the movie “did not make you feel warm and fuzzy at the end as a good sports film should.” How true! A rare opinion on a critical darling!…

But there is a visceral thrill to reading amateur reviewers on Amazon who, unlike professional critics, do not claim to be informed or even knowledgeable, who do not consider context or history or ambition, who do not claim any pretense at all. Their reviews, particularly of classics, often read as though these works had dropped out of space into their laps, and they were first to experience it. About “Moby-Dick,” one critic writes: “Essentially, they rip off the plot to ‘Jaws.'” About “Ulysses,” another critic writes: “I honestly cannot figure out the point, other than cleverness for cleverness’ sake.”

Likewise, to seriously dismiss “The Great Gatsby” as “‘Twilight’ without the vampires,” as an Amazon reviewer did, may be glib and reductive, but it’s also brilliantly spot on, the kind of comparison a more mannered critic might not dare. “Whoever made that ‘Twilight’ comparison, whether they know it, is showing their education, that they can connect new media with old works and draw fresh conclusions,” said David Raskin, chair of the art history, theory and criticism department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago…

Speaking of honesty: It should be pointed out here that, in general, online amateur reviews are not mean but usually as forgiving as the professional sort. Bing Liu, a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied online reviews — “partly because I was curious if they were real or just someone gaming the system” — told me that 60 percent of Amazon reviews are five-star reviews and another 20 percent are four-star. The information research firm Gartner released a study in September predicting that, within a couple of years, between 10 and 15 percent of online reviews will be paid for by companies — rigged.

It sounds like the argument is this: you can find the average American in the one-star Amazon reviews. Instead of getting the filtered, sophisticated review typically found in media sources, these reviewers give the unvarnished pop culture take. Discussed in this argument is the idea of social class and education. An approved reviewer or critic, the typical gatekeeper, is able to put a work in its context. The educated critic is trying to make the work understandable for others. The educated critic often has experience and education backing their opinions. In contrast, the Internet opens up spaces for individuals to post their own reactions and through aggregation, such as the Amazon five-star review system, have some say about how products and cultural works are perceived.

This new reality doesn’t render cultural gatekeepers completely irrelevant but it does do several things. One, it dilutes their influence or at least makes it possible for more critics to get involved. Second, it also makes more visible the opinions of average citizens. Instead of just theorizing about mass culture or pop culture, we can all see what the masses are thinking at the moment they are thinking it. (Think of the possibilities on Twitter!) Third, it provides space like in this article for reviewers to admit they don’t always want to write erudite pieces but want to have a “normal person reaction.”

Just one problem with this piece: the critic says he doesn’t really read the one-star Amazon reviews for information. Instead, he appreciates the “visceral thrill.” He quotes an academic who says such reviews reveal cultural gaps. Thus, celebrating the one-star reviews may be just another way to assert the traditional reviewer’s cultural capital. Read the one-star reviews for entertainment but continue to go back to the educated reviewer for the context and more valued perspective.

New cultural gatekeepers: paid online reviewers

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After recently discussing buying Twitter followers, the New York Times explores another new online realm: paid online reviewers who only give extremely positive reviews.

In the fall of 2010, Mr. Rutherford started a Web site, GettingBookReviews.com. At first, he advertised that he would review a book for $99. But some clients wanted a chorus proclaiming their excellence. So, for $499, Mr. Rutherford would do 20 online reviews. A few people needed a whole orchestra. For $999, he would do 50…

“The wheels of online commerce run on positive reviews,” said Bing Liu, a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois, Chicago, whose 2008 research showed that 60 percent of the millions of product reviews on Amazon are five stars and an additional 20 percent are four stars. “But almost no one wants to write five-star reviews, so many of them have to be created.”

Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.

Mr. Liu estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service.

I am most intrigued here by the possible change in relationship between a reviewer and an author. The article suggests there is some sort of “sacred” distance between the two: the reviewer is free to criticize the work without recrimination. Some reviewers have attained elite cultural gatekeeper status, people who guide decision-making for millions of people. Think of critics like Siskel and Ebert and Robert Christgau who are seen as authoritative figures. Hence, people are upset when they learn that a positive review they saw wasn’t an “honest” opinion but rather a business transaction.

However, let’s not forget that these reviewers also make careers out of their thoughts – they may not have sold out to a corporation or a product but they do have a financial interest. I would argue that this distance between reviewer and author/creator has never really been so sacred and there are plenty of areas where we are used to paid reviewers. If you follow a reviewer enough, you can often learn what they do or do not like. Indeed, some reviewers have become outspoken proponents of certain movements and not others. Is this based on a completely rational, detached perspective? Of course not. Don’t many reviewers interact with the people who are producing the products they are reviewing? Think of blurbs on the back of books: are these truly unsolicited comments or from people who are truly judging the merits of the book? More crassly, commercials often present “reviewers” or “real people” or people made to sell certain products. Perhaps this is simply a sign of our times and will become normal as there is clearly a market for good reviews.

It will be interesting to see how websites like Amazon, heavily dependent on user reviews, works through this issue. I always try to read both the five star and one star reviews when considering a product. Additionally, there are other issues: the ratings can be about the product itself or a particular aspect of the product or about people’s expectations for the product or the shipping or the customer service or something else. I think Amazon could include a few extra questions, as other websites do, that would help one sort through the variety of reviews. Overall, the system is not perfect and we should be aware that we may not be getting the “unvarnished truth,” but at least it is better than going off anecdotal evidence from a friend or two…right?

Sociologist: Oscars are “insiders rewarding insiders”

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As people watching the Oscars last night might have wondered what some some of the winning films were about (Best Picture winner, The Artist, has taken in just over $31 million at the box office), a sociologist argues that the Oscars represent “insiders rewarding insiders”:

“The annual Oscars are a vital component of our cultural machinery, not only reflecting taste but producing it – and thereby creating profit for moviemakers,” says Ben Agger, director of the Center for Theory in the University of Texas at Arlington’s sociology department, in an e-mail. “The voters are insiders rewarding insiders.”…

A Los Angeles Times report found that 94 percent of Academy members are white and 77 percent are male, with blacks making up only 2 percent and Latinos less than that. The median age of Oscar voters is 62, with just 14 percent under 50 years old.

This has led to accusations of gender and race bias. But Charles Bernstein, who for 10 years was chairman of the Academy Award rules committee, is a bit tired of the yearly accusations that come AMPAS’s way.

“The Academy is not a democracy but a meritocracy,” he says.

The job of the Academy is not to reflect but to lead, he adds. These are great professionals who have achieved distinction in motion picture-making, and they are merely saying, “Here is what we most respect.’”

This is a classic culture question: does culture reflect society (perhaps the organizations and social conditions or the demands of consumers)? Or put another way, should cultural products be rewarded for being popular or being the best or outside of the box?

This could be viewed as a gatekeeper issue: who gets to decide the merits of a cultural product? I suspect the battle between “mass culture” and “high culture” will not be settled anytime soon. At this point, what would Hollywood gain by changing the current system? The Oscars are popular television and there still are enough blockbusters for Hollywood to keep moving forward. At the Oscar gathering I attended, another attendee and I were thinking through an award titled “the movie American movie-goers loved the most,” perhaps marked by the box office winner or some votes from people who actually attended the movies (perhaps like the older system of doing all-star balloting at sporting events). I also wouldn’t be surprised if the Oscars found a way to include some voting input from the public, even if it was more symbolic than anything else. Perhaps their solution right now is to include enough popular films (like Bridesmaids) and celebrities (like Tom Cruise, Jennifer Lopez) in the show to keep people happy even though the popular people aren’t going to win.

If we truly are headed toward a more individualistic, more culturally diffuse world, we might expect that the Oscars and Grammys and all sorts of cultural gatekeepers (officials reviewers, critics, etc.) will face more trouble. This would not only be an issue of whether a majority of a culture actually experiences significant works (an interesting question in itself) but whether the public actually cares about what the gatekeepers think (why watch the Oscars if they don’t even talk about movies that most people see?). I don’t think we are close to the end of the gatekeepers but this is going to continue to be a fault line to watch.

Sociologist suggests celebrity chefs can help limit food waste by promoting uses for leftovers

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It is common to find food waste demonstrations in college cafeterias where students fill large receptacles with their leftover food. A sociologist argues that people need better models for how to use leftover food to limit food waste:

Sociologist Dr David Evans, from The Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester, says the pressure to cook meals from scratch using fresh ingredients while enjoying a variety of dishes throughout the week can actually lead to waste.

His qualitative study – in which he went into the homes of 19 Manchester households – helps explain why Britain throws away enough food each year to fill Wembley stadium ten times over…

Current levels of food waste, he argues, should be viewed as the fall-out of households negotiating the complex and contradictory demands of their day-to-day lives.

For example the pressure to cook and eat in the ways that celebrity chefs advise means that a lot of food is already at risk of getting thrown out.

He said: “A lot of so-called proper food is perishable and so needs to be eaten within a pretty narrow timeframe. Our erratic working hours and leisure schedules make it hard to keep on top of the food that we have in our fridges and cupboards…

People with influence – like celebrity chefs – he says, should acknowledge these issues and think about ways of making it socially acceptable or even desirable for us to eat the same meal several nights in a row or use frozen vegetables.

It sounds like this sociologist is suggesting that it is unfashionable and unreasonable right now for most consumers to eat all of the food that they have prepared.

1. I assume the fashionable aspect has to do with the image that food needs to be prepared fresh for every meal. This is what cooking shows typically demonstrate but it would be rare that home cooks could cook an exact amount at each meal. Could the Food Network really sell a show solely built around dressing up or using leftovers?

2. The second part of the argument is that life is too hectic for consumers to really eat all of their food. Couldn’t meal planning help here? (Or perhaps they need Ziploc bags to limit waste as an ad I just saw on TV suggested.)

Overall, this sociologist is arguing that we need a cultural shift regarding leftover food and the place to start is with important cultural figures/gatekeepers who can make it cool to not waste food. This is an interesting solution compared to the work of someone like Michael Pollan who suggests the answer to food issues lies more in rethinking our relationship to food and slowing down when we make and eat food.

British sociologist wins case against reviewer

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Reviews are a key part of the academic world as researchers, journalists, and others assess and judge the work of others. Within this world, a British court recently sided with a sociologist who had sued a reviewer:

A High Court judged ruled that Lynn Barber’s 2008 review of Seven Days in the Art World by Dr Sarah Thornton, a noted sociologist, was “spiteful” and contained serious factual errors. The Telegraph Group, owner of The Daily Telegraph, which published the article, has been ordered to pay Dr Thornton £65,000 in damages.

While the country’s critics regard such factual errors as justifiably punishable, the case still raises questions for scribes who have grown accustomed to saying what they like about whomever they please…

There is a long history of critical clashes. The most high profile are necessarily those that end up in court. In 1998 the journalist and TV presenter Matthew Wright “reviewed” the play The Dead Monkey starring David Soul, calling it “without doubt the worst West End show”. The chink in his armour was that he’d never actually seen it, and Soul won £30,000 in a libel case.

Sometimes, the clashes are less clear cut. One anonymous arts critic told The Independent about three legal threats that had recently landed across his desk, none of which ended up in court, incidents he described as “shots across the bows”. To avoid such clashes, critics may find it necessary to limit how often they tackle certain subjects. “My view is that a critic has to be honest and say what he or she likes,” said Brian Sewell, art critic at the London Evening Standard.

The story suggests there two components to the lawsuit: “spiteful” comments and factual inaccuracies. I imagine the case was decided in the sociologist’s favor mainly due to the factual errors in the review (which didn’t have to do with the book but about what the reviewer said about an interview with the author) rather than the critical comments which are common in reviews.

The case reminds of how I heard one academic describe reviews: they are opportunities to knock down other researchers and if you are gracious or perhaps even neutral in a review, it can be interpreted as a sign of weakness. Reading some reviewers (academic or journalistic), it is sometimes hard to imagine they would be happy with anything.

The unpredictable nature of Twitter cascades and social marketing

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Tim Harford in the Financial Times discusses mathematical sociologist Duncan Watt’s research on why certain information in social media catches fire among a large group of people (like in a “Twitter cascade”) and other information does not. Watts suggests several factors are important: we tend to see what becomes successful and what is not, popular posts are small and uncommon, and “it’s impossible to predict which tweets will start cascades.”

There are lot of people who would like to take advantage of social media to share information and sell products. This sort of research suggests it is more difficult to do this than some might think. On one hand, having a lot of friends or followers means that more people could see your information. But on the other hand, this does not necessarily mean that people will pass along your information to their own set of friends. If Watts is right, does this mean that companies or organizations should change their strategies or even limit social media marketing?

This is not just a problem in studying social media. It is also difficult within other fields, such as film, music, and books, to predict what will become a success and what will not. A common solution there is to simply produce a lot of material and then wait for a small percentage of products to generate a lot of money and help subsidize the rest of the material. This also seems to be the case with social media: there are a lot of people sharing a lot of information but only a small part of spreads through a larger population. This might also mean that gatekeepers, people who have the ability to sift through and analyze/criticize content, will continue to be important as the average user won’t be able to see the broader view of the social media world.

Could some of this problem be the result of the actual design and user experience of Twitter? If so, might companies and others work toward creating different forms of social media that would increase or enhance the sharing of information across a broader set of users?

The (terrible?) world of “professional” Amazon reviewers

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A recent study of some of Amazon.com’s top 1000 reviewers has PC Magazine writer John Dvorak questions the validity of their reviews:

In the first academic study of its kind, Trevor Pinch, Cornell University professor of sociology and of science and technology studies, independently surveyed 166 of Amazon’s top 1,000 reviewers, examining everything from demographics to motives. What he discovered was 85 percent of those surveyed had been approached with free merchandise from authors, agents or publishers.

Pinch, who also found the median age range of the reviewers he surveyed was 51 to 60, a surprise said Pinch, because the image of the internet is more of a young person’s thing. Amazon is encouraging reviewers to receive free products through Amazon Vine, an invitation-only program in which the top 1,000 reviewers are offered a catalog of free products to review…

This is the fraud aspect of the process that cannot be tolerated. And now to find out they are in a much older demographic makes me think they are just product hoarders who will say what they need to say to get more products. This conclusion is hinted at by the professor.

I do not like man on the street reviews. I never have, and I’ve always thought they could be easily corrupted by smart public relations folks who have already dove into what they call social media. This includes phony personas on Twitter and Facebook that are used to sway public opinion, shipping free goodies to “influential” bloggers, and things like this Amazon scandal.

Dvorak is not really arguing that reviews are not valuable but rather that because Amazon does not fully disclose how these reviewers operate, customers could be duped. The problem here is trust: Dvorak and others might assume that reviewers are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts but instead they are “professionals.” Instead, these reviewers are being “paid.” This is a classic gatekeepers problem: how do you know that a reviewer is trustworthy and giving unvarnished opinions? There are plenty of critics these days for various media outlets and websites. I suspect many average citizens have to read through multiple reviews from a single critic to see if their thoughts line up with their own or to see if they are consistent.

Of course, Amazon relies on a crowd sourcing approach, just like aggregator websites such as Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. Do these top reviewers really sway people’s opinions about products since there are often many others who provide reviews of the same products?

Why not ask Amazon whether critical reviewers have been kicked out of these programs? Dvorak is suggesting that these reviewers would speak positively about products just in order to receive more – couldn’t Amazon fight back against this?

My first thoughts when I saw this study a while back was that how confident could Pinch be about his findings based on 166 reviewers. Why not go for a larger sample out of the 1000 Top Reviewers?

(Side note: at the end, Dvorak applauds Pinch for tackling this topic:

By the way (and off topic), you should read my writings over the past 30 years, because I have been hounding sociologists around the world to begin to study these sorts of computer and Internet activities. Give Professor Pinch an award, will you! Maybe that will encourage more studies.

Maybe so.)

The Oprah Winfrey Show as “sociological patent office”

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With the wind down of The Oprah Winfrey Show, various commentators are trying to assess its impact on American culture. How about seeing the show as a “sociological patent office”?

Oprah’s show, meanwhile, became a kind of sociological patent office, the first stop for anyone with an idea or a product or apology to sell. With her rich alto and soulful eyes, her comfortable curves and pitch-perfect mix of hubris and self-deprecation, she was the mother/sister/wife/rabbi/friend we never had, the lap that would envelope us even as the hand slapped us to attention. When James Frey lied to Oprah, even Frank Rich, then New York Times grand poo-bah of punditry, came on the show to give him what for.

This paragraph seems to suggest that Oprah was a cultural gatekeeper: if people made it onto her show, they were able to make a (presumably successful) pitch to the larger American public. In a world awash in information and cultural products, people could turn to Oprah for her opinion and stamp of approval. She was a cultural critic without necessarily acting like the snobby/elitist critics one finds in newspapers, on news shows, or online. How exactly was Oprah able to become this gatekeeper – was it simply because of her growing audience (according to this critic, due to a message of self-empowerment) that was able to consume a lot of goods on their own (everything from O magazine to the OWN tv network) or was Oprah particularly astute at reading what the American public wanted or needed?

Since we are likely to see a lot about Oprah’s successes over the years, were there also plenty of times where Oprah’s “sociological patent office” was unsuccessful? James Frey was one notable example but Oprah then had a chance to reverse her course by publicly dealing with Frey on her show.