Heath Kemper
Dr. Gail Shuck, Dr. Matt Hansen, Dr. Dawn Shepherd
English 592
17 April 2018
“I've Literally Lived All Over the Country:”
Yelp Reviews and the Ethos of Disclosure
Over the last two decades, the widespread accessibility provided by digital communication platforms has spurred an explosion of amateur critical writing. Public ratings and reviews, once the almost-exclusive realm of specialized professional critics, have now become ubiquitous components of online life. Because the only major barrier to posting online reviews is access to the internet, and because user reviews are often not subject to any sort of rigorous prepublication scrutiny, these online review sites provide a forum that is both accessible and immediate for nonprofessional …show more content…
While this shift has unquestionably resulted in a greater quantity of food writing, it has also given rise to a tendency to view this category writing primarily as data; most review platforms generally aggregate individual evaluative metrics to present an “overall” rating and present the reviews themselves in a uniform format that sometimes makes it difficult to easily gauge the reliability or relevance of any single review. An additional complicating factor is that the genre of online reviews is also shaped, to a significant degree, by the decisions of the corporations who provide review-writers with a platform. Although individuals often have a fairly large degree of freedom regarding the actual textual content of their writing, many other aspects of their reviews, such as length, layout, the ability to choose identity-based or anonymous usernames, photograph inclusion, and ratings systems, are dictated by platform providers and necessarily represent the embedded values of parties other than the writers themselves—which may conflict, or even be entirely at odds with the values of the review-writer (Kimmons, …show more content…
One particularly relevant study, by Vasquez and Chik, examines the various ways in which writers perform “foodie” identities in online reviews, observing that
Dr. Gail Shuck, Dr. Matt Hansen, Dr. Dawn Shepherd
English 592
17 April 2018
“I've Literally Lived All Over the Country:”
Yelp Reviews and the Ethos of Disclosure
Over the last two decades, the widespread accessibility provided by digital communication platforms has spurred an explosion of amateur critical writing. Public ratings and reviews, once the almost-exclusive realm of specialized professional critics, have now become ubiquitous components of online life. Because the only major barrier to posting online reviews is access to the internet, and because user reviews are often not subject to any sort of rigorous prepublication scrutiny, these online review sites provide a forum that is both accessible and immediate for nonprofessional …show more content…
While this shift has unquestionably resulted in a greater quantity of food writing, it has also given rise to a tendency to view this category writing primarily as data; most review platforms generally aggregate individual evaluative metrics to present an “overall” rating and present the reviews themselves in a uniform format that sometimes makes it difficult to easily gauge the reliability or relevance of any single review. An additional complicating factor is that the genre of online reviews is also shaped, to a significant degree, by the decisions of the corporations who provide review-writers with a platform. Although individuals often have a fairly large degree of freedom regarding the actual textual content of their writing, many other aspects of their reviews, such as length, layout, the ability to choose identity-based or anonymous usernames, photograph inclusion, and ratings systems, are dictated by platform providers and necessarily represent the embedded values of parties other than the writers themselves—which may conflict, or even be entirely at odds with the values of the review-writer (Kimmons, …show more content…
One particularly relevant study, by Vasquez and Chik, examines the various ways in which writers perform “foodie” identities in online reviews, observing that