The Crowd
One of the generally agreed upon things in the modern, 21st century wealthy nation world (or at least the politically progressive part of that world anyway) is the democracy of the crowd. We love the crowd, whether real or virtual, love being a part of it, participating in it with our technology and sometimes our feet and our voices. We look to our partners in the crowd for good restaurant recs on Yelp, find out what’s happening out in the world on Twitter, feel solidarity from it in Occupy protests. But this is not your old-school crowd of nameless, faceless people called out for rallies by the union president. In the new crowd, we all have equal voices, with our individual rights and feelings protected and even prioritized. We feel empowered to destroy a business’ reputation on our beloved Yelp if they didn’t note a food ingredient we didn’t like in a salad we ordered. Each and every one of us (or at least a few of us in combination) can grind an Occupy meeting to a halt if we loudly register our anger at this or that position, or just because we aren’t comfortable with the process.
We love this tension between the crowd and the individual, the empowering solidarity, even if we wouldn’t necessarily call it that with most of our online interactions. But is the individual just as manipulated by the crowd of other individuals as by a corporation or political party or any other institution? In our empowered individualism within a huge community of equally empowered individuals, are we any more savvy? Are we participating in a democratic process through an Occupy protest or is the bogged-down consensus process that Occupy so values an open opportunity for stools from the police to sabotage the movement’s ability to do anything (I’m not saying this actually happened, but given the history of police infiltration in American social movements, it seems quite plausible. Plus the answer to the above question is likely both)? Is an anarchist who is showing influence within a movement and convinces some other people to break windows without larger approval from the entire movement a committed thinker or an agent provocateur?
For that matter, is there any reason to believe any kind of customer review online? This Times piece on professional “reviewers” being paid by self-published authors to give positive reviews, a process that seems to lead to increased sales for many, suggests to me that we, even the most supposedly savvy of us, are as manipulated now as ever. The crowd and the empowered individual does not protect us in any way, in fact, it may make us more vulnerable as our confidence lets our guard down.
On Twitter, Matt Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) said about the Times article, “Possible future scenario: online customer reviews are ruined, publishers become more authoritative.” I thought that was interesting. Does the fact that anyone can say anything mean that all statements become equally worthless without some kind of expertise to back it up? For that matter, could we see a future where, as a broader society, we see the pendulum swing back toward expertise and institutionalized leadership in books, politics, or all the other ways in which we distrust expertise today?
And while it may seem that comparing political movements and profiteering manipulation on websites are apples and oranges, in my mind they are part of the same phenomenon.
Obviously I could be wrong about all of this, but it’s what I’ve been thinking about in my spare moments for the last few days.
There are all sorts of great theoretical reasons why wikipedia, Yelp, Amazon reviews, etc. shouldn’t work, as well as real identifiable problems with parasites and trolls and poor leadership at the top. Yet they still do work, and as a whole better than their expertise-based competitors. The crowd has proven pretty resilient so far. Which isn’t to say that it will live forever, but is to say that we should be cautious about predicting its death.
Well, there’s an underlying assumption that they work. But do they? Particularly as corporations get more savvy about manipulating those sites? I’m not predicting its death by any means, but I think there’s increasing evidence that what we think works may actually be us being hoodwinked.
In my experience, Yelp ratings correlate pretty well with actual restaurant quality. What other test is there?
Usually they work well when you have a critical mass of reviews. My experience maps pretty well onto the ratings of restaurants, for example, with 20+ reviews. When there are only a few they are not terribly useful.
You can also rely on user ratings of reviews, which are pretty resilient. You can flood a site with a number of negative or positive reviews. It’s a lot more difficult to flood a site with a number of well-written and persuasive reviews.
I’ll just offer the observation that most review-type sites allow you to click a reviewer’s name to see their other reviews. If they only have a single review or they overwhelmingly started reviewing a single manufacturer’s products in a one month period, then you should probably be suspicious. If they have dozens or hundreds of reviews of a variety of different products/businesses, which “thematically” make sense, and preferably are spread over several years or more, it seems like that would be a strong sign that they’re real.
This isn’t a problem. There’s this thing called “reputation” which human beings value -it’s a measure of an individual’s honesty and fair-dealing over time- and this provides the solution to the entire dilemma. If users read another user’s review, buy a product based on it, then find that product faulty, they will never, for the rest of their lives, let that user live it down. Basically, the sites and reviewers who users find reliable will become and remain popular, while those who punt for goods and services later found to be wanting will develop a reputation as shills and be ignored.
That doesn’t solve the problem with social movements you also mention of course, but it is the way humans navigate “crowd-sourced” information sites and web-sites generally, and it seems to work just fine.
In our empowered individualism within a huge community of equally empowered individuals, are we any more savvy?
No.
Actually I think formation of “the crowd” more and more obviously comes into being (or view) through the kind of P.R. campaigns you’re talking about. There’s a strain in crowd theory (recent Laclau, I think?) that says the crowd is constituted through signifiers, as opposed to identification with a leader (Freud) or, like, “passions” or something.
I was thinking about this recently too. This guy Ryan Holiday (some asshole) was on NPR talking about his career as a self-styled “media manipulator.” He orchestrated feminist protests against Tucker Max, e.g., to promote that Serve Beer in Hell movie, and gave fake quotes to reporters while posing implausibly as an “expert” in whatever they wanted.
I see a future in which everyone cultivates a perfect cynicism as all space resounds with a constant sales pitch, and I see someone else somewhere else profiting from that cynicism.
I don’t see people cultivating a perfect cynicism or even a healthy skepticism. Instead, I see people retreating to comforting narratives that they use to shield themselves from the anxiety of critical thinking. They become discerning searchers for and consumers of facts or ‘facts’ that fit the narrative and disregard those that don’t.
That is how Romney’s welfare lies are doing so well with voters who already believed that Obama was taking our tax money and giving it to the [insert racist epithets]. And nothing will be accomplished by telling them the truth.
Worst case scenario happening here. Anti-facters? Nativist chanting? Hard to see anything good coming out of this political tailspin.
Anything that makes one pine for Poppy Bush is not something good. I’m just sayin’.
I’m deeply suspicious of online reviews, simply because the pool of people who would take the time to make an online review of something seems completely unrepresentative of the population at whole. Every time I read a good review of something, I wonder if was from a paid flak, friend of the owner/author, or some dedicated superfan, and similarly I assume that most bad reviews are written by people with axes to grind – they’re either fans of a competitor or the sort of horrible, impossible-to-please customer from hell that’s anyone who has ever worked in retail knows all to well. It’s why so many ratings show an anti-bell curve (lots of 1s and 5s, not many middlin’ reviews).
And then there’s the fact that Yelp contacts businesses with negative ratings and offers a paid service where their ratings can be “reviewed” (i.e. bad reviews can be de-emphasized or eliminated altogether), which seems like a 21st century cyber-reputation version of a protection racket. Nice 4.5 star rating you have here, be shame if something happened to it…
I’ve noticed, especially with electronics, that it’s good to read people and see if they are all having a common problem with a device.
I dismiss most positive reviews because they are mostly useless in determining whether I want something.
I concur, that’s what I largely do too – if there isn’t a massive chorus about specific problem(s), I don’t really pay any attention to online reviews.
I agree with this. Positive reviews are only useful if I have enough knowledge of the tastes and interests of a reviewer to know that their tastes align with mine. Because most positive reviews boil down to “I like this because it is a thing that I like and it has been put together in a manner which I find pleasing to me.” (It is actually amazing how many professional reviews are essentially to that idea dressed up with numerous sentences to try to make it sound objective, nevermind the amateur reviewers at Amazon.)
Negative reviews, on the other hand, are often very specific. “I hate this because it does X in this way, which I hate” is informative. Maybe not in the way that the reviewer intends (again, my tastes may not align) but at least I usually get a pretty good – if biased – description of how X works and what a few of its limitations might be. (Could also be the limitations of the review writer, though, so reading many reviews is still important.)
really? jesus, no wonder this society’s in such trouble
It seems to me that the problem with the systems you mention (Yelp, Amazon reviews) are defective due to their anonymity or (pseudonymity) and lack of reputation. Not being able to know who is giving the review means we can’t evaluate it’s veracity.
So the question is, how can we prevent people with ulterior motives from hoodwinking us?
D’you remember Napster, and how you could check out other people’s music collections? If someone had three dozen artists you love, and a dozen more you hadn’t heard of, you might think those new ones were worth checking out, right?
Amazon reviews of books and music are almost worthless. The “other people bought” promotional buttons and other folks’ reading lists are more useful.
I am reminded of this:
Democracy is great for many things, but not truth.
I detest having to look for information online. There is no real way to vet information if you are not yourself an expert. This is why so many otherwise educated people don’t vaccinate their children. I search for expertise.
One example: I run quite a bit for exercise, but I am not knowledgeable about running shoes. Online, it is impossible to tell what is and is not an ad, and people all have their weird fetishes (front-foot striking!!1! etc.). So I go to a store in NYC called Jackrabbit that refuses to take ad money and promotions from shoe vendors – they just get you in the right shoe. They have expertise untainted by ads, which is worth the price.
Besides, the near-terminal narcissism of Yelp reviews is revolting.
One thing online reviewers are NOT is a “crowd” – the phenomenon has much more in common with the idea of being a journalistic correspondent, returning one to the early days of the periodical press when much of what was printed was precisely “correspondence” from individuals, than it does with any notion of collectivity.
And in those early days, of course, we find one B. Franklin, Esq., proprietor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, purveyor of fabricated letters to himself, all subjects covered, guaranteed to raise profitable controversy on any matter of public concern.
What goes around, comes around, again and again and again…
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In my experience, by now, about 99% of Occupy (see what I did there?) absolutely loathes General Assemblies and has stopped going to them. Because you are correct that they’re a great opportunity for idiots with an ax to grind, first-timers who don’t actually care about the movement but heard from a friend that it was considering voting on something they don’t like, and police infiltrators. And yes, police infiltrators using GAs to sabotage things has actually happened; it happened at my Occupation.
We really need a better decision-making structure. My idea is to try keeping a lot of the same concepts but to require a little buy-in – you have to sit with your working group, caucus, or affinity group, at the assembly, and they have to acknowledge you as a member in good standing, before you can participate. It doesn’t solve everything – a bunch of infiltrators could form their own affinity group, for instance – but it would have prevented some of the more problematic situations that we ended up with here. It also might encourage affinity group formation and discourage the unreasonable fear that some Occupiers have of affinity groups, which would be helpful.
Also, more use of spokes councils, for chrissake.
That said, I’m not entirely sure how that leads into this:
Is an anarchist who is showing influence within a movement and convinces some other people to break windows without larger approval from the entire movement a committed thinker or an agent provocateur?
Also in my experience (I’ve been to Occupations at Boston, Harvard, Northeastern University, DC, Manchester NH, Portland OR, Chicago, and now Tampa, and talked to Occupiers from all over the country), the small number people who fetishize the GAs and making everything go through the GAs, are worried about precisely this. They want everything to go through the GA because they don’t trust decentralization. They’re the same people who don’t want to give working groups the autonomy that they need to actually function and are terrified of the idea of affinity groups.
My own answer would be that the window-breaker is not necessarily either a committed thinker or a provocateur, just misguided. And he/she/they can do that, and persuade other people to do it, just fine in a more traditionally-organized movement – it’s not like tactical disagreement and splinter/breakaway groups were invented with Occupy.
I don’t think the Occupy model has much to do with distrust of expertise, honestly. Occupy might be non-hierarchical, but there’s a great deal of role specialization. As a medic, I have a specialized role. So do the people who prepare food, do security patrols, perform street theater, handle Occupation finances, or write press releases. Some people have/had more than one specialized role, but people were generally encouraged to find at least one thing they could do well and practice that thing.
[...] of opinion, forget about making change. It alienates people immediately. Yet, in our atomized and hyper-individualistic modern left, a modern left very much shaped by the fetishization of individualism pushed upon us by the [...]