Human Rating Systems

With all the buzz going around regarding Instagram hiding the “likes” that people get on their pictures, and being that one of our classmates posted a blog about this recently, I could not help but think about that one Black Mirror episode I saw a while back. Any Blackmirror fans here? Give a “like” to my post (just kidding).

I am talking about that Season 3, Episode 1 titled “Nosedive”. *Spoiler alert – I am about to summarize the episode*. The episode takes place in a world where people can rate each other every single time they have an interaction with each other, from 1 (low) to 5 (high) stars. Specifically, the episode focuses on a female character named Lacie who is obsessed with getting the best ratings. Long story short, she gets way in over her head with this obsession, ends up in multiple situations that cause people to give her bad/low ratings, and in turn causing her overall average rating to go down. Well, in this world, having a low rating is a cause for you to be exiled from society, and this is exactly what happens to her. I remember when I saw this episode I thought to myself how similar this was to what was already happening in the world of social media, and this is exactly what this episode was eluding to: people’s obsession with their online image, getting people to “like” their photos, and getting “followers.”

In addition, upon researching more about this episode, I learned that this episode was highly compared to a new app called “Peeple” which has been described as the “Yelp for people”. Apparently, this app allows people to leave recommendations for other people, about people, based on their previous (or current) relationship with them. The original version of the app allowed you to rate people as well, but the app received so much backlash that it removed the feature before launch.

As I was writing this blog up, I also thought about the various ways we already do this rating system. Uber lets me rate my driver and vice versa, and Air B&B lets me rate my host. The human rating system is everywhere, and in a sense, is another version of a review – but somehow it has become for dangerous with people obsessing over what others think of them. Thoughts?

References:

Jones, R. (Writer), Schur, M. (Writer) & Wright, J. (Director). (21, October, 2016). Nosedive. [Television series episode] In A. Jones (Producer), Blackmirror. Knysna, South Africa: Netflix.