I consider God to be the master creator. He is a writer, poet, illustrator, caricaturist, doodler, inventor, explorer, scientist, and someone who is forever pushing in surprising products. Like, for instance, a few days back the newspapers were talking about strange species in the deepest part of the oceans and some of them were yet not in the ‘discovered’ list. What we call mutation is simply God’s way of having fun with a new product that he launches with some sort of logic woven around it. Our telescopes in space are still finding surprising things that we never thought could be there. As human reviewers we like some and dislike quite a few of these other things that we discover. I’m sure God isn’t bothered.
If we bother to consider God’s own opinion, we must agree that reviews are not meant for creators but only for consumers. No, there isn’t any arrogance there but simply a trace of pragmatism. A writer, for instance, needs to be focusing on writing more than reading and getting affected by a few stray opinions of individuals who may have a terribly differing perspective. The reviews by themselves transform an individual into a creator… and, therefore, by my analogy even reviewers must go on reviewing without allowing their individuality to drown in tsunamis of opinions about their work. This cycle is endless and makes each of us a creator of some sort.
Forget books, films, plays, devices, gadgets, and every other consumable thing for a while and let us talk about a decision that the senior management takes in an organization. Most of us will agree that the moment some decision is communicated there will be hordes of employees huddled and dissecting it. These employees are reviewers and their opinion shouldn’t really bother those high up in the hierarchy. There is a caveat here that I wish to mention. If a new website is developed, testers are asked to find out flaws… they are not the sort of reviewers we are talking about. The editor of a book and the proof reader from the local proofreaders UK company as well are not reviewing a finished product. While a product, service, or even political or administrative decisions are in a stage of examination or are being carefully observed for nicks and bruises, opinions of competent people are considered anyway. The final product needs implementation. That’s it. There are times though when even implementation techniques need to be constantly under observation for evolved interventions.
Let’s take the example of marketing of a book where social media platforms were added to the arsenal only after a lot of deliberations… and they may be out of consideration some day in the future. However according to experts like Andy Defrancesco, these are not reviews but survival techniques that businesses adopt as a regular practice.
Reviewers can lead creators to do things they must not
If writer K has found that writing thrillers fascinates him, he needs to stick to this despite reviewers suggesting that he might be able to capture a larger chunk of readers if he adopts romance for his new book. This is a simple example of why creators need to focus on their strengths and why they need to build upon those strong points. Yes, there are writers who can tackle multiple genres successfully… well, we are talking about the depth of talent here and not a decision swayed by reviewers. When businesses diversify, they do it because of market surveys and not because some reviewer has had some outlandish idea and the company bigwigs decide to follow that lead. It is analytics working here and not whimsical ideas meandering through review pages.
Reliability of reviews – for whom?
There is an interesting story of a film critic who was under tremendous pressure to review ten films in a week, every week. He found a ready-made solution in maneuvering his review around obvious facts and opinions relying heavily on his previous experiences and he successfully got them published without having watched those films. He smiled and called this his penchant for intuitive fondling of a subject. I know a lot of technology and lifestyle reviewers who do just this… and some of them are widely read and appreciated. Plenty of book-reviewers too do this all the time. If you think this makes reviews unreliable, then yes, if handled clumsily the reviewer dies a premature death and the entire citadel of reviews suffers cracks.
Now if you ask if this is a good technique, I must say it is not. There is a certain degree of unreliability built into such techniques and consumers of reviews finally see through them.
Current trends in reviewing are so much social media oriented that I have found young girls in their twenties sharing silly boomerangs of them making funny faces or doing ludicrous body jiggles with expensive automobiles or gadgets in the frame and getting hundreds of ‘likes’ on twitter, Instagram, and facebook. These are modern day short-forms of reviews and I find them utterly unproductive. I mean, will a smile and a jiggle sell the Renault Triber or Samsung Galaxy Note 10? If it does, I am definitely not with the times. Will panning in-and-out short clips sell tourism, hotels, home-stays, restaurants, and expensive meals? No. This is because reviews are meant for the consumer of products and services and such juvenile antics might generate ‘likes’ but will never transform into positive purchase decisions. Such a review format is obviously unreliable.
There is another fallacy about ‘reviews’ that is rather popular with the YouTubers of today. They think it is fine to rattle off the specifications of any product and mumble something that resembles ‘yes, I bought it, and you too must’ as enough… the tragedy is that these online dolts excel in the race to get more followers which translates into great figures for media agents and junior management to garnish their graphs with. No one ever bothers to question if any of these followers are ever going to buy the product that they are whole-heartedly liking and commenting on. Let me add here that the social media ‘influencer’ brigade is the biggest fallacy that has ever existed and I wish the phase disappears soon enough. These people are harming the very perception of a review – written or in av format.
Yes, reviews can and must be creative and imaginative. Creativity and imagination isn’t exactly similar to a mere recitation of specifications and all those tik-tokish wiggles and wobbles that one sees in abundance. Corporate thinkers are making all the wrong conclusions about the real meaning of ‘influence’ and must wake up soon to the fact that an imaginative story woven to sell MG Hector or the newest launch from Vivo is by far better poised to impress the real buyer.
To my mind, a good review is one where the reviewer has read a book, used a gadget, or experienced a service and then decides to relate his moments of elation with imaginative story-telling juxtaposed with facts and quotable facets. The reviewer is, of course free to prove his point by even deciding to go into the recesses of history or literature to discuss something as unrelated as a smartphone for gen Z. If quoting stats strengthens a certain perspective, then yes, this must be done. I remember once reviewing a smartphone by retelling the story of Rip Van Winkle… or the time when I compared an automobile to the protagonist of the novel ‘A man called Ove’. These are creative elements and must be appreciated as such thought the technical features of a product must not be glossed over. It is the same with books. There is a book called ‘HDFC Bank 2.0’ that I reviewed a few days back and wrote that it ‘has the heart of a novel and the mind of an information treasure’ and picked up anecdotes from the book to prove my point. This was simply my way of telling the reader that the book wasn’t about hard-core financial texts and was fairly readable.
So yes, reviews, when they are pertinent and have adopted the creative path, are certainly the most desirable… and probably reliable.
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Arvind Passey
29 August 2019
