The Ben Nevis and Il Duomo reviews make me particularly sad, as reviewing things implies a demand for an ‘experience’ and, with that, certain expectations as to how a mountain or a catholic church should ‘perform’ as an attraction. Moreover, it implies that you are entitled to a ‘service’, otherwise disappointment or even anger will ensue. However, the reviewers don’t seem to appreciate that the very act of reviewing places such as these is destroying both the experience and the understanding of what it is that we are seeing.
A flicker of light
Il Duomo is a church, a holy place dedicated to god, not a tourist attraction. And if you think it is a tourist attraction, then it is that only because you are a tourist and you cannot see it in any other fashion. It is not there to entertain you or even please you, it is there to glorify god, and the only reason they charge an entry fee is because there are so many people coming to see it that they have to do something both to control the numbers and to pay for the damage that the tourists cause by their presence.
Ben Nevis is a mountain, a lump of rock created by geological forces, which rises up high enough above sea level to have been given the title. There is nothing more or less to it than that. To rate it, let alone have expectations about what a lump of rock may provide in terms of consumer experiences is frankly at best bizarre and at worse idiotic.
Of course, the fact that Il Duomo and Ben Nevis can be rated at all is the fault of sites such as TripAdvisor. On the other hand, it isn’t exactly their ‘fault’ because they didn’t specifically choose to have mountains rateable on the site. They simply wanted to generate more traffic to their website, so naturally added sites and attractions to all the hotels and restaurants on there so as to have another reason for people to engage with their platform.
That the logical conclusion to this blind urge to increase traffic ended with Ben Nevis being rated by at least one user as worthy of just one star is by-the-by. That the user rated as such is their choice, and theirs alone. The consequence, however, is that we are all cheapened by the existence of the review. The mountain isn’t cheapened. To that, we are merely a passing flicker of light compared to the things that it has witnessed over the millennia.
When five stars is too much
But what happens when having to rate things out of five stars gets a bit much? After all, you have to commit with five stars. You have to decide what you feel, and how much you feel it. You have to grade your opinion, to find at least some degree of nuance. Yet this is not an age of nuance, it is an age of instant gratification and mindless choice.
So what is the natural progression of the 5-star rating in such an age, so that you can express an opinion without having to think at all? Why, the Like, of course, created by Facebook as a unidirectional unithought; an uptick, embodied as literally a thumbs up. It covers everything from merely okay to wonderful and, as such, it is a homogenising, flattening, degrading, emptying expression of all positive responses into their simplest form.
On Facebook, users are encouraged to rate everything in this way. Every post, every picture and every shared thought by your friends and family, as they make them, is given a thumbs up. Or not. Can you imagine if you did that in real life to someone, while you were talking them? How would they react? How would you react if that was done to you?
Eric without Ernie
If you think about it, a thumbs up is really just a ‘yes’. At least the Roman emperors could lay their thumb sideways or turn them down, but all we get is an empty, flattened, degraded positive response, devoid of all context. After all, what is ‘yes’? It is one half of a duality that goes with its opposite: ‘no’.
To have a 'yes' without its 'no' is like having 'on' without 'off', 0 without 1, ying without yang, stop without go,
Eric without Ernie. It is, in short, meaningless without its opposite (apart from Eric and Ernie, who were great on their own too). To exist, to mean something, to have import and to have something to say, 'yes' must have its opposite; otherwise, the degraded, flattened, empty positive response is even further desaturated of meaning.
So, to underline the absurdity of these non-binary responses to life, and all those numerical ratings of everything, whether it be a photo, ice cream, a painting or a tree, I have created the ultimate reviewing system:
The No-Way. In it, I review things only as a No. No yeses, no maybes, no ifs and definitely no buts.
It is the ultimate response to all of this wipe-clean, family friendly, offensively non-offensive bland, empty, degraded and flattened positivity that has seeped into every part of modern life. Some things I review will be genuinely things I don’t like; some will simply be things that I have meaninglessly disapproved of just to see what it looks like. It really is that stupid.
I hope you don’t enjoy it.