Rethinking Cultural Criticism by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811574740
Publisher: Springer Singapore

Extrapolations and Implications of the New Reviewer Persona: Conclusion

Each of our cases of reviewers identifies major efforts at personalizing their display. Mae, because her reviews are less visualized and with a focus on text, resembles past models of reviewers much more than the YouTube reviewers of Jahns and Stuckmann. Nonetheless, all three are working in this transformed world of online persona where one’s labor is simultaneously dealing with how to pull identity closer through an understanding of any platform’s valorizing of aggregated and algorithmically constructed persona and somehow linking that to the authentic display of online persona that reviewers’ readers and fans observe and thereby become para-socially emotionally connected.

It is important to realize that this investigation of online reviewing could be extended into other areas and domains. Critique and review are very difficult to quarantine in online culture. Each platform produces a different reconstruction of the movement of opinion. Reddit, for instance, would have generated another permutation of how critique moves around a group of connected people in a club-like fashion as it often generates information bubbles (Sumpter 2018). Product reviewing with its clear attachment to commodities has generated further variations of reviewing: John Herrman’s study of Amazon’s Vine reviews identifies the odd world of how the most-referred-to reviewers of products including books are in an elaborate game of receiving products for free (Herrman 2019). In some ways, our process of reviewing is overwhelming. As much as this study and chapter have focused on Rotten Tomatoes’ approved YouTube and film critics, it is just as valuable to at least mention that the comment sections related to reviews and attributed to audiences construct another sense of more “real” and “authentic” reviews. For example, Rotten Tomatoes’ Audience Reviews actually dwarf the critics in a resounding way for the film, It Chapter Two. Verified audience reviews—ones where Rotten Tomatoes can authenticate that the individual audience member has bought tickets to see this particular film—total 4655, while the total audience reviews total 8524. In this slightly different world of critique, one sees various lengths of commentary with some resembling funny one-liners that come close what one might post to a friend or a Snapchat group, while others come close to the style and flow of those identified above as a “Top Critic”.

As discussed above, there is an instability in contemporary online review culture with authenticity; an odd new signifying chain in online reviewer persona culture is to make visible and get closer to those who post or comment—their engaged subscribers. This connection with fans’ commentary and engagement parallels one of the telling partial-truths of the online pandemic of meme-sharing and transformation: Meme-augmenting is relatively anonymous and thereby makes the meme-chain more authentic and more popular. Memes, for instance, are basically transforming a particular commentary on a popular event in online culture for further sharing. Memes thus, in essence, are a form of review of some aspect of our culture: Their articulation and sense-making are dependent on our inclusion into a further chain of signification that helps identify its continuing and amplifying collective laugh.

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