A brief comment on the scope of my project
Hi there. Since I posted my Humanities Center proposal I thought I'd add a comment or two about the scope of my project. I'm not trying to do a definitive study of online citizen reviewers or to make highly generalized arguments about them. I'm definitely not trying to write a book on them! (I completed three books in the last two years, so books are a no no.)
Instead, I see my study as exploratory. Until I learned about the research that Professor Gronas is doing at Princeton, I hadn't been able to find any other scholars focusing on this emerging genre. So I'm hoping partly to describe what's already happening on the web and partly to raise questions about online citizen reviews. I'm also hoping that my research--which I hope I will ultimately present in an article--will encourage other scholars to investigate online citizen reviews.
posted by Lisa Ede @ 1:16 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Reviews of what art forms?
Hope
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Well, it will be interesting to see what questions develop as you proceed through the research process. My questions would be:
Is there to money ever to be made in online reviewing?
Do the bloggers who profess to have no interest in a mass audience being honest with themselves?
What genres and art forms are boosted by online reviews? What is the Blog Critics business model?
Is blogging generating an audience that demands shorter sentences and an English prose style whittled down to dumbed-down nothingness?
Hope
Hmmm. Here are some brief and tentative responses to Hope's questions.
Re money and online reviewing: I don't know the answer to that for sure. Salon is a significant online site for reviews, and it has become a fee-based web service, so there's that. But there certainly are people out there willing to write lots of reviews for free. The Amazon.com reviewers are a good example.
As Paul Bausch pointed out to me in a recent conversation, the most well-known Amazon reviewers could easily set up their own sites and earn at least some income through the Amazon.com Associates program. (As I understand it, the way--or one way--this works is as follows: if someone reads a review and then orders the book from Amazon, the reviewer gets a percentage of the sale.)
As for bloggers who profess to having no interest in a mass audience, I expect the answer is as varied as human nature itself. Some probably genuinely don't care about a mass audience. Others, like those who appear in the Newsweek article on A-list bloggers, may be secretly or not secretly thrilled to have been written about.
The question about genres and art forms is a great one. I suspect that popular genres and forms are boosted more by online reviews--but then Professor Gronas's research may suggest otherwise. (There's a post on his research in an earlier blog entry.)
I don't know enough about Blog Critics to know what their business model might be. Do you have any thoughts on that, Hope.
Re style numbed-down to nothingness by blogging, my guess isi that it's possible to find just about every kind of style on blogs. Some blogs are erudite, witty, and elegant. (The Humor Hangout is an example.) Others are dumbed-down nothingness.
So perhaps this calls for a closing comment: given human nature and human variability, it's inevitable that there's going to be huge diversity in the blogosphere.
If a person wrote reviews for Amazon and took a cut of sales that would be a big-time conflict of interest. Bad reviews=low sales. One would think, anyway.
People who claim they don’t want an audience are total phonies. Of course bloggers want an audience. I don’t get up at 2 a.m. to blog for nothing. Actually, I do but not on purpose.
I wonder about what art forms are boosted most by blogs. I would think a chamber music blog would have as much impact as yet another review of a blockbuster movie.
The Blog Critics busienss model is deals with Amazon, primarily, as far as I can tell.
Elegant? It’s like so cool to have one’s blog characterized as elegant.
Hope
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