Reviews have always been something important within the cultural sphere in general since the very beginning of mass media. Film reviews, book reviews, music reviews, theatrical play reviews... Almost every outstanding newspaper publishes this kind of journalistic works in their pages. And the audience is used to it. Whenever they want to know something about the latest movie from their favorite director or the newest film premiered in the newest film festival, or about the last album edited by the last hyped singer or even the play they're showing in the theater near home, they read the critics' reviews. Every newspaper, radio station or TV channel (one with proper cultural contents, which is not something easy to find right now) employs some of these people called 'critics', those few guys who have the right to say what they feel about anything they can and whose opinion is legally influential in average people's minds.
Critics' work has developed within the new media and convergence culture atmosphere to websites such as review aggregators, which, Wikipedia says, are “a system that collects reviews of products and services (such as films, books, video games, software and hardware)”. Websites such as Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic provide this kind of service, reviewing reviews from different sources to make a collective review that should tell us what to think. Of course, the websites make profit of it, selling information to third parties about consumer tendencies or creating databases for companies to know about their actual and potential customers. This is the “critic 2.0”, the new media critic, as a result of the merged collaboration between information creators, which can easily be watched as a symbol of the Internet's collective intelligence.
But, does all of this really have a point now? In nowadays situation, when everyone can publish his own journalistic works, or whatever similar, when everyone has what it takes (technically) to make public all of their opinions, thoughts and rants, who's and who's not an influential critic? All of this is right now inside the collective intelligence web phenomenon. Everyone can rate films, everyone can review them, everyone can contribute to improve a film's public image, or the contrary. FilmAffinity or IMDB, the largest movie database in the net, known as the Internet movie database, are some of those sites where average people play critics. Everyone wants to let everyone know what they like and what they don't like. IMDB's highest rated movies (decided by all of the users, from all the movies in the world and in the history, which leads us to something like the universal collective opinion) feature titles such as director Christopher Nolan's “The Dark Knight (2008)” (which is at #10) and “Inception (2010)” (which is at #8), which are obviously there because of their wide acceptance by the mass mainstream audience, but which are arguably far away from that so-called selection of the 10 best movies ever (hum, Frank Darabont's “The Shawshank Redemption (1994)” is at #1).
This leads us to the place where you may wonder if the critic's work is anymore necessary. And in a higher scale, it leads us to the place where you may wonder if the journalist's work is anymore necessary (but that's a whole another topic -or rant-). Anyways, it does lead us to there where none of these nowadays influential websites should be taken so seriously as to decide what's the mark for a movie, what's the mark for a director, or what's the mark for an actress, because they're just what they seem they are, they are grades based on people's opinions. It doesn't matter anymore if the persons who rate the things are experts on the topic, or people who don't really care about it. It's one good -or bad- thing the new media phenomenon leads us to, which is equalling what everybody has to say. But, this is what is happening right now, which is still something interesting to see and be involved in, but, always, keeping a good distance.
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