discourse, and also imposes rigidly-defined boundaries on discussion. It provides an agreed-upon shorthand that strips out any sense of subjectivity or any concession that opinion is not fact.
It is no surprise that movements like Gamergate, which are consciously designed to impose boundaries on discussion and participation, use the word “objective” in their critical aspirations. Gamergate is the product of a culture that was raised on the importance of a hundred-point scale, a grading curve anchored in scores of “8.8.” The number is not a subjective argument, it is an objective statement. Objective is always superior to subjective, because it provides concrete validation of an opinion without any need for qualification or elaboration.
This obsession with “objective” criticism is perhaps reflected in modern internet spoiler culture. Modern critics have come to dread “spoiler-phobia”, where internet commenters object to the relying of even basic plot or character information as part of a review. This fits with the internet’s fixation on reducing criticism to statements perceived as verifiable fact; calling out “spoilers” in reviews is often used as a silencing tool, to limit and control debate by reference to something more concrete and grounded than opinion.
It should be noted that Rotten Tomatoes is ultimately the standard bearer for a much larger cultural emphasis on ratings and rankings. There are any number of metrics that might inform an audience member of a film’s worth: the more curated critical score on Metacritic, the user-voted score out of ten on IMDb, the simplistic “thumbs-up”/“thumbs-down” grade on Netflix. Picking a movie to watch can often feel like sorting through a collection of baseball cards, an effort to reduce something wondrous and magical down to a loose assemblage of numbers and statistics.
The Rotten Tomatoes score becomes the “tl;dr” of internet film criticism.
“People in this country have had enough of experts,” argued Michael Gove in the lead-up to Britain’s referendum on leaving the European Union.
It turned out that Gove was correct. The “Leave” campaign narrowly won the referendum, despite countless experts advising the public of the risks to Britain should it depart the European Union. In the year since the vote, the British public have repeated been confronted with problems and crises that were clearly articulated by experts in the lead-up to the vote, but which the public chose to ignore.
Public discourse has become a lot more polarised in the twenty-first century. Surveys have demonstrated that American politics are more polarised than ever. In 1960,
CinÉireann / December 2017 21
Legendary BBC critic Barry Norman