Certified Fresh?: A Call to Review Our Review Aggregators

With the launch of this new blog, I'll be including some links to a few of my past articles, and here's one whose subject I think is still very relevant: how should we feel about review aggregators' effect on the entertainment industry? Are sites like Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes just helpful tools for navigating a vast sea of movies, TV shows, music, and video games? Or could these systems be too heavily influencing our experiences of the things they review? To be honest, I love Metacritic, and I like what these aggregators have done to empower critics, but sometimes they do make it harder for me to form my own impressions on things. I also wonder what impact they're having on artists and how comfortable people feel taking risks. Here's part of the article below, and you can read the full version here.

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"One of my biggest concerns with how we use aggregators is not the act of aggregating itself but how all-consuming we’ve let their scores them become. You don’t have to go to Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic anymore to see how a work was scored, as these scores now regularly appear in many other places you may go for more information on the product. Simply searching for the title of a movie on Google will immediately bring up its aggregator scores, for example, and IMDb, Moviefone and numerous others post Metascores as well.

While Metacritic is actually one of my favorite sites, and I use it regularly, its ubiquity elsewhere makes it much more difficult to opt out of seeing reviews if I instead want to go into something cold. As a result, I rarely watch or play something without already being prebiased with quantified assessments of how “good” the work is supposed to be. And reviews, as has been proven extensively, do influence our perceptions. This doesn’t mean I can’t form my own opinions, and I don’t always agree with the critical consensus, but it does mean that I can find myself questioning whether my response to a given work was really authentic or whether I’ve been subtly led to align myself with the opinions I already knew were out there."

(For the rest of the article, you can read more here.)