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What are Editors? And how do they rate reviews?Sep 24 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Are editors better at rating reviews than the rest of us?
While I’ve been a member of Epinions for a quite a while, for a reasonably large part of that while I didn’t have access to a computer at home, and now that I do, I am so conscious of giving all of my mother’s money to Deutsche Telekom that I don’t go on t’Net so often (as we Northerners are compelled to pronounce it). So I haven’t had a chance to totally immerse myself in the whole Epinions culture yet, as many other members have so evidently done. One thing I haven’t quite grasped is the concept of ‘editors’. They’re quite hard to miss these days as they’ve now got a big blue blob next to their name on every review they’ve rated. Who are these privileged few? How did they get the right to have the word ‘EDITOR’ after their name? Can they put it after their name on official documents, along with the 3rd Class BA in Media Studies that they picked up at Hull University? And what process must they go through when they are given their esteemed title? From reading the guff on the help pages – “How often are Editors selected?” “Editor selection occurs once a month.” – I can’t help but imagine a Royal ceremony-type occasion, whereupon the newly selected Editor should kneel before the boss of Epinions and humbly receive his Editorhood. Are editors more qualified to write reviews, or indeed to rate them? I must say, when an editor gives my review a ‘Very Helpful’, it does strike a chord, as if I have been given some small token of recognition by the elite, as opposed to us ordinary scum who only have a normal underlined link on our username instead of a little pictogram. But why should it mean more than anyone else’s rating? I have been pondering this since a couple of days ago, when I was just going through my rather miserable looking collection of reviews (all six of them) – you know, looking to see if anyone’s posted any comments, that sort of thing (needless to say they hadn’t – my opinions seem worthy of a few ‘Very Helpfuls’ but little discourse). Whilst going over my review for Massive Attack’s Mezzanine (the link is on my profile, folks!) I spotted a ‘Somewhat Helpful’ sticking out like a sore testicle amongst about five ‘Very Helpfuls’. The offending article was by kuuleimomi – EDITOR. Naturally intrigued, I went to kuuleimomi’s profile, and eventually got to her review of Mezzanine. The opinion seemed to concentrate on the vocals – what I liked least about the album – and made numerous references to who she thought had influenced the band, which I didn’t agree with (she said Moby and Faithless, I said King Tubby). So fair enough, we obviously have different ways of listening to music. I assumed that her ‘Somewhat Helpful’ referred to this disagreement. Later on, I went back to Destinys-Child’s opinion of Blue Velvet - an opinion which I had scorned with a comment posting and a rating of ‘Somewhat Helpful’ - and was naturally delighted to find that he’d written back. In his reply he accused me of only rating highly those opinions which I agreed with, and said “it’s a good thing there are not so many of your types in Epinions”. Well, I was speechless! When I rated his review, I was merely following by example: I didn’t agree with his one-star rating of what I thought was a classic (and I thought his review stank), so I gave him a ‘Somewhat Helpful’. Isn’t this what kuuleimomi had done with my opinion of Mezzanine? Now, I really don’t want to drop kuuleimomi in it. I am merely suggesting that editors know just as little about how to rate reviews as the rest of us. I don’t know if anyone else has wondered this, or indeed if anyone else can tell me whether editors are better equipped to write and rate reviews – certainly there are no bad editors on Epinions, not in my experience at least. I just want to know: what does it all mean?  |
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