When Is Rotten Tomatoes Wrong?

James Madison would have hated Rotten Tomatoes.

Sure, he might have appreciated the fact that movies existed, but Madison was also the man who, in the Federalist Papers, formulated perhaps the foundational argument against mob rule.

“There is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual,” Madison wrote. “Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention.”

Concentrating absolute power in the majority leads to tyranny because nothing prevents large groups from imposing their opinions on small groups. In a phrase, mob rule confuses popularity for quality.

A wise thought from Mr. Madison, and one that sadly applies across much of the Internet.

In the case of Rotten Tomatoes, the mob has slapped a score of 20-percent onto the cult classic of “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl.” That’s unfortunate, but not as unfortunate as the fact that this sort of crowd-sourced criticism tricks you into viewing general consensus as absolute truth.

There are no checks and balances in this system, only the majority opinion.

Even on Twitter (or Facebook) it’s common, if not expected, to measure the quality of a tweet (or a photo) by how many retweets (or likes) the original garners.

In this way, majority approval in the virtual world—on Amazon, on Instagram, on Yelp, on YouTube, and so on—overshadows all other considerations and contributes to a collective psychology in which we agree to accept the most common opinion as the most correct one.

“Whoa there,” I can hear you saying. “Stop yelling. Surely you need to acknowledge the difference between a mob-ruled government (dangerous, pitchforks involved) and a mob-ruled website (harmless, all-caps involved).”

I agree, to a certain extent. Madison was considering some of the heaviest practicalities that any human being can consider. That’s why he contributed to the Constitution while I contribute to The Crimson.

However, I believe that my polemic against this follow-the-majority psychology has merit because such psychology, when shared by an entire society, deeply hurts the way that content is produced and consumed on the Internet.

I’ll begin with the producers—not only bloggers, moviemakers, and remote-control manufacturers, but also us, the great social-media generation.

Since all web users participate in a system that understands popularity as quality, we strive to garner as much positive attention as possible. We crop, tag, and caption our Facebook photos in exchange for crowd approval. We give our Crimson articles headlines such as “15 Amazing Thoughts about BuzzFeed” in order to grab more eyes.

In effect we focus less on producing the best content than on producing the most popular content. Our need for majority appreciation results in self-censorship.

And in those cases when we don’t receive the desired amount of adulation, we feel awful. If fame is success, then anonymity is unmitigated failure. In one extreme case, this perspective led a little-known blogger named Dennis Williams to reveal his discontent to a Washington Post reporter before committing suicide.

Meanwhile, for consumers of content, accepting the majority opinion suffocates idiosyncrasies. If you need a place to eat, you’ll just go to the most-starred restaurant and buy the exact meal that everyone else has bought.

Why should the average opinion of human beings matter anyway? The average opinion neglected Van Gogh in his time (“One star—a total lunatic”) and awarded Best Picture to “How Green Was My Valley” instead of “Citizen Kane.”

But for you righteous rabble-rousers who want to buck this whole majority thing, the structure of the Internet constrains your rebellion. The front pages of websites display the most popular items. Facebook feeds back the most-liked items. YouTube prioritizes the most-watched videos.

It’s not a matter of swallowing what the mob feeds you; it’s a matter of opening your mouth at all.

In certain cases, it can be beneficial to know whether more people prefer the color of this toaster-oven to that one. However, most websites go several leaps too far by letting you slide into thinking that the shared opinion is right. Unless you make a real effort to resist, you adopt the Internet’s publicly assigned judgments of the worth of art, objects, and even other people.

Anarchy is not the answer—please don’t smash your computers. In order to maximize the value of the Internet, however, you must learn to distrust the easy statistics of popularity.

After all, a movie with a 20-percent rating is not automatically less worthwhile than a “masterpiece” with a 90-percent rating. Especially if the 20-percent movie focuses on the adventures of a shark-boy, and perhaps even a lava-girl.

Sam Danello ’18 is a Crimson editorial writer living in Grays Hall.