A Review of Reviews
That's right, we're getting meta with this post. Here are my thoughts on the concept of trying to rate something on a 5-star scale.
The concept of a review is sound enough: It’s a critique written or recorded by someone who is thought to be knowledgeable of what they’re talking about to help us decide whether something is worth our time and money. I question whether reviews are really meant to help us make up our minds, or if they’re just personal essays, another way for us to talk about ourselves.
I question whether reviews are really meant to help us make up our minds, or if they’re just personal essays, another way for us to talk about ourselves.
The reviews I like to read about books, films, restaurants, are written in a way that makes it clear that the writer is using the review to figure out what the work means to them. And that’s what I want to know: How might a piece of art change my life, my perspective on the world? I like to think of reviews as extensions of their subjects. I came across this beautiful line in a little book by Hisham Matar about his appreciation for Sienese paintings that captures this perfectly: “[The paintings from the Sienese School] are examples of the kind of art that would later dominate, whereby the subjective life of the observer is required to complete the picture.” It’s interesting to think that no piece of art is complete without each of our subjective perspectives.
According to The New York Times Learning Network—a branch of the Times that puts together sample curriculums and provides other resources for teachers—the internet, phones, having access to WiFi everywhere we go has changed our review culture: “Before the digital age, review writing was largely the province of a small circle of elite tastemakers” like The New York Times, they write in the overview of a curriculum for teaching students how to analyze and write about a subject critically. “But these days, all of us are invited to be reviewers.”
Interesting how “before the digital age” and “but these days” make the sentence a critique in itself. We just can’t help ourselves from reviewing, well, everything. I, for one, don’t mind the democratization of reviews—it’s good that they no longer solely occupy the ivory towers of publications like the Times and The New Yorker. It helps take away a snobbishness they tend to have, a stuffiness.
But spreading the power to write reviews to everyone does pose new challenges and questions. How does it change the dynamic of review writing if consumers—the people reviews are intended for—can write reviews themselves? Whose opinions matter? How do we ultimately make a decision about what’s good and what’s not?
An area where reviews have become necessary but also overwhelming is in the online marketplace. Because we can only view images of the tangible products we want to buy, and because there are a million versions of a single product on platforms like Amazon, we rely on product reviews to help us make decisions. But how many reviews do we have to read before we make up our minds? And what if the reviews are all conflicting?
In a Refinery29 article published back in June, writer Alexandra Jones confronted her own obsession with reading online reviews by talking to other women about how they’ve used product reviews while shopping online. One woman who was trying to buy a jump rope while in quarantine just couldn’t make out whether any of the ropes she was reading about would be right for her, so she fell down a review rabbit hole: “The more I read, the more confused I feel about whether this was the right rope for me. And the more confused I got, the more reviews I read. Eventually I had to step away.”
Another woman Jones spoke with bought 8 different moisturizers because it turned out there wasn’t a best one to spend her money on. The truth is that online reviews might not help you make a decision, but they can help you feel good about a decision you’ve already made. “I think what I was looking for when I was reading reviews was confirmation that I was making the right decision,” said one of the interviewees. “Most of the time I’d already semi-decided on a product, so reading the positive reviews just made me feel good about my purchase.”
“I think what I was looking for when I was reading reviews was confirmation that I was making the right decision. Most of the time I’d already semi-decided on a product, so reading the positive reviews just made me feel good about my purchase.”
It’s strange how little trust we have in our own decisions that we need to seek out other people’s opinions to confirm that we’ve made the right (the best?) choice. Jones points out in her article that what her interviewees sought were “genuine opinions.” Genuine, here, can probably be defined in myriad ways, but I think what we’re trying to get at is that genuine opinion is as close to truth as we can get with a review. “Reviews are where an experience meets ideas,” writes Jon Pareles, a pop music critic. “The best criticism [even criticism can be reviewed!] merges the details of the individual experience—the close-up—with a much broader picture of what the experience means.”
Yes, I’m with Pareles so far, but then he goes on to say, “a review is not about the reviewer… It’s about what you experience when you meet the work head-on with full attention.” Here’s where I disagree, because I think that reviews are (at least somewhat) autobiographical, even if there are no ‘I’s’ in a piece.
“A review is not about the reviewer… It’s about what you experience when you meet the work head-on with full attention.”
I find that reviews are almost never about what’s being reviewed, but the reviewer. A review is about someone’s experience, whether that experience is with a piece of art or a doctor’s waiting room. And that experience is influenced by who a reviewer is, what they know, how they grew up, where they’re from. Even if you’re not the audience the thing you’re reviewing is intended for (as TV critic Neil Ganzlinger points out, you might end up reviewing a video game for 9-year-old girls, even if you’re not a 9-year-old girl) and you have to consider whether the intended audience would actually like what you’re reviewing, the words you put to paper are still filtered through who you are.
Despite a critic’s effort to use as few ‘I’s’ in a review as possible, despite the inclusion of measurement systems like a star-rating scale, reviews are never objective. I most enjoy reading reviews by writers who seem to be aware of how ridiculous it is to try and make what’s subjective sound objective. The writer might even lean into the autobiographical quality that reviews have. That’s what I like about John green’s podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed, which inspired me to review different aspects of pandemic life. Green’s attempt to rate our human-centered existence on a star scale is, of course, a tongue-in-cheek way to comment on just how self-centered reviews are. Still, it gives him an interesting angle for examining topics like air conditioning, hot dog eating contests, and our capacity for wonder—he has to draw some conclusion about how every topic relates to the human condition and, in the end, quantify how great the phenomenon is with a star rating.
I most enjoy reading reviews by writers who seem to be aware of how ridiculous it is to try and make what’s subjective sound objective.
My choice to review different aspects of quarantine was meant to help me make light of a grim situation. It’s a little ironic that I could never, subjectively, give 5 stars to anything related to a global pandemic, but that’s also the point. Our quest to find and experience the best life has to offer often leaves us feeling disappointed. And reviews aren’t an adequate way to capture what the experience of pandemic life, a piece of art, an exquisite meal is like; there’s too much ‘I’ in them.
We turn to reviews because we like knowing that someone has tested the waters for us before we dive head first into the deep end. In her Refinery29 article, Jones describes the reviewers of a wax she ultimately decided not to buy as “pioneering women who’d tried and tested [the wax] before me.” And these women took the time to write a review about their experience so that other women like Jones would know what they’re getting themselves into. That’s why Joanna Gailbraith of the Our Freaking Budget blog takes the time to go beyond star ratings to read the reviews for different products she wants to buy online or in a traditional brick-and-mortar store. “Some people will complain about the shipping or packaging, which aren’t knocks on the product but the process itself,” she writes. “It takes a little more time to read the reviews, but it makes all the difference.”
Given that we’re all inundated with choices about what to consume on a daily basis, it seems that we, as consumers, have a responsibility to formulate genuine opinions about the stuff we buy, and share those opinions with others. We have a responsibility to help other consumers learn from our mistakes and triumphs.
While reviews are subjective, there are some comments and complaints that could be applicable to anyone who’s looking to buy a specific product. Let’s use a blender as an example—if a blender doesn’t blend, the job it’s supposed to accomplish, only pulses, that’s a piece of objective information that could help any shopper make a decision. Although, I guess we have to take into account that we all have different preferences for how we like our smoothies blended, so someone might think that a blender that pulses is a perfectly functional blender.
When it comes to criticizing culture—art, food, film, literature, music—reviews become much more personal, and not just because of a reviewer’s experience of the work. A book, a film, a meal all have creators, a face that can be tied to them. It’s weird, but unless something was handcrafted we don’t really think about who makes it, so reviewing a blender probably doesn’t feel at all personal.
Children’s book editor Maria Russo thinks of a book she’s been asked to review as “something that has been entrusted to me.” She talks about the dual responsibility she has as someone who critiques books for a living: “First, you have to be sure to do right by the author” by showing that you actually understand their work. “But the second—and probably the paramount—responsibility,” she writes, “is to my own readers, the people reading my review to figure out whether they should spend their money and valuable time on a book.”
“But the second—and probably the paramount—responsibility is to my own readers, the people reading my review to figure out whether they should spend their money and valuable time on a book.”
Russo also considers being able to convey her opinion about a book as a privilege, and it isn’t one she takes lightly. “When I sit down to write the review, what I’m ultimately trying to do is document my reaction. That’s I guess what makes a review feel honest,” she writes.
So we hope that we can trust reviewers to express honest and genuine opinions that are based on fact and come from close engagement with whatever it is they’re writing about. In any review we read, we hope we’ll see ourselves, our lives, the very experiences we could be having reflected back at us. But as we know, the anonymity of the internet makes it easy to parade fake opinions as genuine ones (I really like this distinction one of the interviewees made in that Refinery29 article. I get what she means by genuine opinions without exactly being able to articulate why), and that’s exactly what’s happened with community review sites like Yelp!.
In any review we read, we hope we’ll see ourselves, our lives, the very experiences we could be having reflected back at us.
A New York Times article from 2011 reported on the review writing services that started to pop up on freelance writing platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Fiverr.com. People on these sites could be hired by businesses to write 5-star reviews about their services, or negative reviews about their competition. Yelp!’s algorithm might have changed now that 10 years have passed since this article was published, but at the time the company was criticized for filtering reviews. They tried to detect and filter out the fake reviews onto a separate page where they could still be viewed by visitors, leaving the community to decipher whether or not a review was valid. But what is the criteria for a real review versus a fake review? The Times article doesn’t make this clear—because it’s not. “Our job is to find and filter out fake reviews [...] At the same time we let our audience know that this system isn’t perfect,” said Vince Sollitto, who was a media representative for Yelp! In 2011.
This is frustrating for both consumers and business owners, who already feel like they’re at the mercy of customer reviews. It’s especially true for restaurant owners, dentists, and other services that rely on good reviews for online visibility. It only takes one rival dentist who hires a freelancer to write a negative review to bring down the online reputation of another dentist. The real negative impact is that it forces businesses to obsess over the reviews they receive on these community platforms.
In a blog post by Donald Burns on the site Foodable, Burns argues that this “external obsession” is what keeps restaurants from innovating, from being great as opposed to just average. “You need to have a little kaizen [a Japanese concept that refers to businesses seeking constant improvement] in your core values and mission,” he writes. “Being obsessed is good when it pushes you to want to do more and more. This is internal obsession. You want more of this.”
Burns’ advice is to avoid becoming obsessed with reviews, but not to ignore them entirely. While critics and consumers have a responsibility to be genuine and honest in their criticism, the business or creator needs to take some accountability. They need to be honest with themselves and reflect on what truth, if any, there is in a critical review of their work.
At the root of this review of reviews is an evaluation of our relationship to criticism. We’re always seeking the best, and we want to be the best and do our best. This makes giving and receiving criticism difficult, because how can anything really be 5 stars? In a capitalist society that operates within a black-and-white paradigm, we need a way to quantify what’s good and what’s not. That’s why we find a way to rate everything. We think we need these ratings to experience the world, to help us compare and contrast the experiences we want to have. We like to think that there’s some objective 5-star experience out there, but what might be 5 stars to you might not be 5 stars to me. We’re all different, and so are our experiences of the world.
I do enjoy reading reviews—whether they’re traditionally published or not—and I think this criticism is important. But I don’t want a reviewer to focus on whether I should read or watch something; I want them to analyze their own experience and hint at what I can expect. I want a reviewer to leave room for me to make up my own mind. The danger of reviews isn’t just that we risk putting too much stock in other people’s opinions, but that we might adopt these opinions before we formulate our own. I’m definitely guilty of this—looking to a review to tell me what to think. I don’t do this consciously; I’ve just come to believe that I can’t trust my own opinions, that I need to be sure I have the right opinions.
But I don’t want a reviewer to focus on whether I should read or watch something; I want them to analyze their own experience and hint at what I can expect. I want a reviewer to leave room for me to make up my own mind.
Reviews can’t dictate the success of a desk chair or a film; they can only reflect a reviewer’s experience. I’m pretty sure that The Rocky Horror Picture Show wasn’t a critical success when it was first released, but some of the best nights of my life when I was in my late teens and early 20s were spent watching the midnight showings at my local movie theatre. Both Blade Runner films were critically well-received but weren’t box office successes, so they’ve been elevated to the realm of cult classic. And in spite of all the 5-star reviews that might have been written for different brands of DVD players and Walkmans, they still became obsolete.
We like what we like, we hate what we hate. And sometimes the times need to change for us to make up our minds about or find the real value in something. I give reviews 1 star.
Next up, I’ll be reviewing:
Trader Joe’s
Being sick with something other than COVID-19 during a global pandemic