PRESENT TENSE:From teachers to toasters, we live our lives by star ratings – but who'd want to to live in a two-star world?
IF YOU COULD give your life a star rating, what would be it be? A modest three stars? A boastful five? A devastating one? Actually, if somebody else was to rate your life, what would they give it?
We live in a ratings age. You’re booking a holiday, you check TripAdvisor. You want to see a movie, you check the reviewers’ star ratings. Your kids start secondary school and, admit it, you catch a sneaky look at Ratemyteacher. There are websites – limited so far – that offer ratings of Irish doctors. Ultimately, there are, in the brightest-lit offices of Silicon Valley, people who plan to help you base all decisions on the ratings that matter to you – to create some form of LifeAdvisor. The problem, of course, is that you may be one of those being rated.
How many times this week did you encounter coloured stars, or a percentage or marks out of 10? I read in the Atlantic that, as consumers, the ratings system is liberating us, assisting us to make decisions based on a handy visual shorthand, often an aggregate of many opinions. So how come it’s become something of a tyranny?
You want to buy a toaster, so you look on some comparison website and you see the Toast-O-Matic 2000 at the top of the rankings, with its little stars shaded all the way up to the last point of the fifth star. But not quite all the way.
And in that blankness, in that triangle of white, dwells the doubt. That is where someone, somewhere down the list of 71 consumer reviews has derided it, slammed it, given it one star only because they can’t give none at all. And, like actors, it’s that one bad rating that us consumers remember.
This is because a rating system implies that there can be perfection; that there can be five-star cameras, 10 out of 10 hotels, 100 per cent computer games. To buy anything not at this standard, then, is to buy imperfection.
The ratings system has crept into the consumer sphere from the media world. Many UK papers rate everything they review. A hypermodernist restrospective at the Tate: a considered three stars. Bobby Davro in panto: an ironic three stars.
There are critics – especially the older ones – who hate the whole idea of compressing a 600-word critique of a major figure’s latest work into coloured star. There are some hold-outs. I don’t know if it’s his choice, but Philip French in the Observer still doesn’t have star ratings with his movie reviews, making him a lone writer who insists that you actually read his review to discover his verdict. Which means that he avoids the absurdities that weekly accompany his colleagues. It is an intrinsically flawed system that allows the same amount of stars to be doled out to “did she really just do that with a rusty scissors” Antichrist on the same pages as “didn’t Sandra Bullock make this rom-com twice already” The Proposal.
In reviews, star ratings become handy shorthand not just for whether you should bother with what’s being reviewed, but whether you should bother reading the review at all. For any creative work, on a star rating of five, two is arguably the worst result.
Four or five stars denotes something that should not be missed. Three suggests it won’t ruin the average person’s night to see it. One-star reviews are usually the most readable of all, because it is far easier to write negatively and to throw in a few jokes along the way. So what if you’ve made a piece of rubbish – at least it became an attention-grabbing piece of rubbish.
But two stars? That is to condemn it to a critical and public limbo. Not good enough to see, not bad enough to laugh at, not interesting enough to read about.
Is that what each of us should worry about? A two-star life. A two-star career. Not extreme enough to even be noticed. Because as time goes on, many of us stand a reasonable chance of being rated.
There is enough experience in this country to suggest that the idea could be legally problematic, but whereas there was some media fuss and a court case over Rate Your Solicitor, that site still chugs along. You can now rate Irish hospitals, pubs, golf courses and auctioneers. And to rate the businesses means to rate the people working in them.
Even to put so much private information about yourself online offers up the potential for someone to critique your life. Maybe one day down the line you’ll meet someone in a club, only for them to nip off for a few minutes, whip out their phone and check out your rating. Four stars good. Two stars bland.
shegarty@irishtimes.com
Ross O’Carroll-Kelly is resting
