IMDb GwTW
After several years of progressive illness my health has taken an upswing from the nadir of the summer of 2016 where I lost nearly 60-lb and lay in bed 20 hours a day at a frail 142-lb.
My weight's up and so's my dander.
I wrote the below on the Get Satisfaction discussion board -- https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/writing_reviews_straight_from_the_app -- in response to IMDb's surrender last week to the handheld crowd by relegating user-reviews to a poorly organized annex, betraying its heritage and origins as a BBS discussion by passionate, articulate zealots True-Fen of the films and actors they celebrated.
Actually I prefer the delayed, contemplated, and considered response that signing on to a desktop involves rather than the shallow, trivial, and telegraphic shoot-from-the-lip responses engendered by the phone-toting semi-literati populace who cannot keep in mind the details of a film they watched the day [or even an hour] earlier.
Thoughtful and reflective have been replaced by the InterTubes-Twitter version of Gresham's Law [no, Twiiter-heads, that's not a misspelling of Grisham].
Hannah Arendt wrote about the "banality of evil". I'm sure I'm not the first who posed the inverse, the "evil of banality". That credit may go to James Sloan Allen [1979] and more recently popularized by Elizabeth Minnich in her book of the same name, although her thesis is somewhat askew of the main element which we discuss here, namely the loss of clarity and cogency in IMDb user reviews amongst the ack-ack [anti-aircraft to those of you deficient in major world history] chuff dispensed by the vomitoria of the endlessly masticating maw of that largely unthinking beast the Vox Populi.
By harvesting the weeds with the grain and neglecting to separate the wheat from the chaff [like Wesley, I was a farmboy] with the neutering of the filters and sorting functions, IMDb has rendered user reviews sterile.
This is not an improvement by IMDb but a capitulation to the yammering masses who cannot bother to read in depth or exert themselves to deliberate before composing a coherent paragraph. The website would have been better served by requiring a 200-word minimum review before a film could be star-rated.
Alas, we are rapidly devolving into Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 world of giant screens and an easily ring-led "tl;dr" population.
You were magnificent while you lasted, IMDb. Fare-thee-well. Sic transit gloria IMDb.
JJB
My weight's up and so's my dander.
I wrote the below on the Get Satisfaction discussion board -- https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/writing_reviews_straight_from_the_app -- in response to IMDb's surrender last week to the handheld crowd by relegating user-reviews to a poorly organized annex, betraying its heritage and origins as a BBS discussion by passionate, articulate zealots True-Fen of the films and actors they celebrated.
Actually I prefer the delayed, contemplated, and considered response that signing on to a desktop involves rather than the shallow, trivial, and telegraphic shoot-from-the-lip responses engendered by the phone-toting semi-literati populace who cannot keep in mind the details of a film they watched the day [or even an hour] earlier.
Thoughtful and reflective have been replaced by the InterTubes-Twitter version of Gresham's Law [no, Twiiter-heads, that's not a misspelling of Grisham].
Hannah Arendt wrote about the "banality of evil". I'm sure I'm not the first who posed the inverse, the "evil of banality". That credit may go to James Sloan Allen [1979] and more recently popularized by Elizabeth Minnich in her book of the same name, although her thesis is somewhat askew of the main element which we discuss here, namely the loss of clarity and cogency in IMDb user reviews amongst the ack-ack [anti-aircraft to those of you deficient in major world history] chuff dispensed by the vomitoria of the endlessly masticating maw of that largely unthinking beast the Vox Populi.
By harvesting the weeds with the grain and neglecting to separate the wheat from the chaff [like Wesley, I was a farmboy] with the neutering of the filters and sorting functions, IMDb has rendered user reviews sterile.
This is not an improvement by IMDb but a capitulation to the yammering masses who cannot bother to read in depth or exert themselves to deliberate before composing a coherent paragraph. The website would have been better served by requiring a 200-word minimum review before a film could be star-rated.
Alas, we are rapidly devolving into Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 world of giant screens and an easily ring-led "tl;dr" population.
You were magnificent while you lasted, IMDb. Fare-thee-well. Sic transit gloria IMDb.
JJB