those pesky amazon reviewers: another angle
lowering critical standards 200 years into the future: a
deplorable lack of responsibility for publicly promulgated opinions
The story that wouldn't die. Well, it might be dead, but I have got a new angle on it, which amuses me so I shall share it. James Marcus, a New York-based writer who for five years was senior editor at amazon.com, has sent me an article (now sadly offline) that he wrote two years ago for the Washington Post after a puff of wind blew up the skirts of amazon.ca, revealing the identities of its 'anonymous' reviewers.
Like all fresh air, this gust blows away some hoary old cobwebs. One of the main accusations I've seen hurled at internet-based reviewers, bloggers etc, is that they often hide behind "the anonymity afforded by the web,". But let's look at it for a moment. Even the most cursory glance round the top of my head reveals, for instance, its recent lodger Charles Lamb, who published his Essays of Elia under the name of - well - Elia. Samuel Johnson - another frequenter of the top of my head - cloaked himself in the veil of anonymity to write his great moral essays for The Rambler. And all his political pamphlets were anonymous.
Maybe this shocking moral laxness on Dr Johnson's part - two hundred years before the internet - accounts for the looseness of some of the definitions in his Dictionary? ("lexicographer - an irresponsible, cowardly, self-regulating drudge." Hmmm.)
the Canadian division of Amazon.com revealed the identities of several thousand of its anonymous reviewers. For just a few days in February [2004], until the company restored their electronic fig leaves, these stealth critics were effectively unmasked. For the most part, of course, this was no big deal. What difference did it make if "a reader from Saskatchewan" turned out to be named Keith -- and actually lived in Hoboken? Surely such minor mendacities could be forgiven. Maybe Keith was just shy, and longed for the Great White North.
Yet there were also some alarming discoveries to be made. A fairly large number of authors had gotten glowing testimonials from friends, husbands, wives, colleagues and paid flacks. A few had "reviewed" their own books. The novelist John Rechy, among those caught in flagrante, pleaded the equivalent of self-defense: He was simply fighting fire with anonymous fire. Other miscreants cited the ancient tradition of self-puffery, practiced by both Walt Whitman (who wrote not one but three unsigned reviews of Leaves of Grass, and quoted them all in the second edition)...
6 comments:
Heh. Like that. Technology giveth, and techology taketh away.
I am grinning from ear to ear.
I always thought it absurd for anyone to rely on an Amazon review, precisely because there is normally no way of telling – whether the poster is anonymous or not – anything about them and hence whether they are the author or a relative of the author in disguise.
Funnily enough, one of the reasons I started my own blog is that I read an Amazon review of a book I liked and got very cross. The reviewer had two very basic historical errors. I get annoyed by that so I put up a correcting review. Out of courtesy, or so I thought, I emailed the same to the reviewer, having clicked on her name and found the address. I received a one line reply asking how I got her address. I told her, and suggested she check with Amazon’s IT staff. I also through in a slightly teasing “I don’t know about Amazon US, but many take the view here that anyone who puts a review on a public site on the internet invites a response”. I got what I asked for – she sent back the most ranting, raging response accusing me of acting illegally, and being an ‘ass’ (though I know as an American she wouldn’t have pronounced it correctly). Well, there you go. Amazon deleted both our reviews so I got what I wanted I suppose. Anyway, I’m not in the business of annoying people directly unless they ask for it, so I set up my own site to insult more freely. And I still take the view that if you put something on the net, you invite the sending of responses to it.
It is great to have this historical perspective - thanks Ms B. It demonstrates how promotion (including self-promotion) and critique have always had completely separate functions and how and why they developed in tandem.
What you've shown with your observation is that promotion has always tried to masquerade as critique in order to accredit itself. We readers should have developed a counter-strategy by now. When you're looking at subjective reader responses, or jacket soundbites snipped from critical reviews, you will probably go for quantity (numbers of 'I liked its').
If you're reading the critics you might work at recognising their shorthand to glean from it whether or not you'd like a book. Mostly you'll be looking for quality indicators of one sort or another.
It did make me think though that in this time of books being so cheap, indeed free for library users, would it kill us to be led astray once in a while by an enthusiastic relative or, indeed author?
There are an awful lot of charlatans out there to be worried about but writers and their families and sychophantic friends are not at the top of my list.
Nic, funny, isn;t it? Mybe echnology is God, after all...
Elizabeth, glad to help!
Political Umpire (Somehow PU doesn't feel like a very nice diminutive...), ah,. you have absorbed the entire ethos of the internet revieew, both the open-dialogue aspect and the weird way that things on the internet have of making us rage like caged tigers... and the third is, it just begs for everybody's opinion! You, I think, are Modern Man incarnate.
TSP, I have? That's good! But yes, that is my premise, that serious criticism will never suffer by anything except a lack of serious critics. I don't think the serious critics are reviewing on amazon (unless their other halfs are writing novels).
I loved the bit about Whitman. Talk aobut grinning ear to ear! He was amazing.
And you're right about taking a risk on a book sometimes - there's also the tried-&-tested technique of just looking at it in Waterstone's to see what you think.
Thanks Ms B. PU is like Francis Urqhart of the House of Cards trilogy - in that case deliberate, so he'd be FU. I'm not really like him though, well not in real life, perhaps on the blogosphere, so call me P-Ump if you like (Dave Hill thought of that).
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