The Value of Critics in Web 2.0
It was Saturday morning and I was listening to “E Lucevan le Stelle” again and again, reliving what I considered to be the captivating elegance of Puccini’s “Tosca”. I was curious to learn more about it so next came the Google search. And there it was – the proverbial cold shower, straight from the pages of Wikipedia’s entry about the author. Benjamin Britten, a British composer, was quoted as having stated he was “sickened by the cheapness and emptiness” of Giacomo Puccini’s music. I felt frustrated by the presumptuous criticism but it left me unfazed in my adoration of the maestro. So what was the value of the supposedly highly informed opinion of Britten as a critic then? I set out to discover.
We seek the opinions of others for many reasons. One is the need to share and co-experience. With my search that Saturday morning, I was hoping to find kindred spirits who enjoyed Puccini’s lyrical score as much as I did. Another purpose of needing external input is to inform our choices, and hopefully make better ones. What facilitates and at the same time complicates the process is that the web has given voice to an enormous number of people and oh, so many of them have praise or judgment to share. Add to the mix the blurry line between subjective perception and substantiated criticism and things get even more difficult to sort out. Whether you want to find reassurance that your preferences are shared by others or that you made a good choice by avoiding that expensive but mediocre meal at the new restaurant downtown, convenient reviews that can feed your confirmation bias are a click or two away. Of course, it would be superficial not to point out that the web has made the work of recognized experts much more accessible, too. Twenty years ago, I would not have likely stumbled upon Britten’s bristling scorn unless I went to a library.
But who do you rely on when it comes to picking the next meal, bestseller or blockbuster – your taste, your friends, or the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? It inevitably becomes a combination of all of the above. I have learned to extricate consistently reliable value from user reviews of restaurants, hotels, books and many other categories. Although I wish someone would come up with an algorithm, not unlike Netflix’s, that, based on the reviews I have previously found most helpful, will point me to the ones I should pay attention to as I am browsing the hundreds of submissions on Trip Advisor’s site for example. You know, a smart tool that will weed out the customer giving a low ranking to a hotel because she expected five star luxuries at the budget rate of 80 euro per night. Or the fake reviews, left by trolls and fueled by competition or some misguided interpretation of freedom of speech.
Naturally, things are easier when we are talking about relatively simple, transactional experiences. When it comes to art, the entry level question is do you need to know the value – cultural, artistic, and historical – of a piece of art to enjoy it? Boldly facing the risk of being called an amateur existentialist, my answer tends to be “not necessarily”. C’mon, folks, did you not see the tears twinkling in the eyes of Pretty Woman’s Vivian character when she first saw “La Traviata”? And yet, the paradigm shifts if you want to evolve from enjoying – or liking – to truly understanding. I will gladly concede that in fields, such as culture, science and the arts, a formally recognized expert’s opinion plays an important and defining role. Enter the critic.
About the blogger:
Petia Whitmore was born and grew up in Bulgaria. For the last ten years, she has been living and working in Boston, MA. She obtained her MBA in Global Management at Babson College in Wellesley, MA. You can find Petia on Twitter @petiapw————————————————————————————————————–
Euro RSCG 4d Bulgaria is based in Sofia, 18 Ivan Vazov street.
We are specialists in digital strategy and consultant in communication online.
Our clients are the largest companies worldwide such as Carrefour, Volkswagen, Societe generale, Edenred BACB, Eon, Solvay, etc
Our main team comprise of Nicolas Galand, Alexandre Glas, Biliana Bogdanova, Zdravko Totinov, Martin Zhelyazkov.
You can send us an email to contact@eurorscg4d.bg or find us on Twitter @4d_bulgaria
Why 4D looks like a …
Hi world,
On February 9th 2011, 18h47, our web project manager put our brand new website on-line. It has been so exciting for us to work on it that we were all impatient to see people’s comments flood the Social Media Planet. Yet we were wondering how would people react at first sight? Would they fall in love with us? Would they hate us? What would people have to say about it? Then it started:
Hello, I think your idea is a pretty good idea!
I’m so disturbed because it feels like we are using Google’s interface. But in fact we are not.
The identification of your website takes quite a long time. I wondered for a bit where I actually was. The result feels more like a “private joke” between developers than a corporate site.
Actually, after thinking about it; it is definitely efficient.
It is super weird.
Why did you decide to create such a page?”
Indeed, the main word that has prevailed in the comments we have received so far, is WHY?
Truth is we have made this visual choice for two main reasons: First of all our main concern was to create an easy-to-browse website: everyone knows how to use Google, right? Secondly as online marketers, we like to come up with unusual ideas and we wanted to create a website with a strong visual impact. Stealing from the most visited website of the past decade as exact template and doing our best to integrate our corporate information felt like the natural solution.
So there we were, trying to think of a tool internet users used for their everyday life and it became obvious for us to design and build our web page as a search engine. But like our disclaimer clearly states “All characters appearing in this website are fictitious. Any resemblance to another website, even to famous search engine, real website, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” Of course, we hope you understand that the aim is also to be fun, just fun.
So it is true that people get lost during the first two minutes. But that is only because our tricky brains, from the very first moments of our lives, associate meanings to our everyday experiences. What Neuroscience teaches us about the brain architecture is that we have an “old brain” and “a new brain”. And guess what?!! Whenever individuals face a new situation, we are primarily driven by our old brain – our unconscious mind – that always tries to connect the current situation emotionally with past experiences. So the “2 min” loss feeling when visiting our website for the 1st time is explained by the fact that our proud good old brain is familiar with the interface yet the shy new brain is trying to inform his counterpart that there is something new in the picture. Then normally should come all sorts of reactions: From “wow”, to “why”, or maybe “boo”, all depending on your level of receptiveness to new situations. But here, I’m speaking about Neuro marketing; a vast topic; isn’t it?
Another question we also got was “Is Google going to prosecute Euro RSCG 4D Bulgaria? Well except for the search bar 
, technically speaking we do not provide the same services, so we hope not, but it does raise the question of the public interest. Google is today part of our Internet history, the identity design too; we strongly believe that eventually every internet user is the owner of Google’s heritage.
You will see that for now it is in Beta Version; only the English version is available. The Bulgarian version will follow shortly. Sadly we do recommend you to enjoy our website as much as possible as the surprise effect is always “ephemeral”! This is why we will come up with a new website design that will be released around springtime.
In Euro RSCG 4D, we believe that success comes from out of the box ideas, yet still with our feet well grounded.
Oh and one last thing, if you’re still worried about the design of our website… The Great Picasso used to say “Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.————————————————————————————————————–
Euro RSCG 4d Bulgaria is based in Sofia, 18 Ivan Vazov street.
We are specialists in digital strategy and consultant in communication online.
Our clients are the largest companies worldwide such as Carrefour, Volkswagen, Societe generale, Edenred BACB, Eon, Solvay, etc
Our main team comprise of Nicolas Galand, Alexandre Glas, Biliana Bogdanova, Zdravko Totinov, Martin Zhelyazkov.
You can send us an email to contact@eurorscg4d.bg or find us on Twitter @4d_bulgaria
Let’s be responsible, let’s be digital.
What if a paperless oriented administration was the solution to make our lives easier and greener?
Well hello everyone, being the new guy around the agency I figured I should first introduce myself. My name is Xavier Oyharcabal (One comment on this blog if you’ve failed to spell it right…and be honest)!! I am a 22 years old French student from Toulouse. (You will know more about me in a future post).
I landed in Varna about a week ago to work for the next six months as an intern with my amazing colleagues at Euro RSCG 4D Bulgaria. The way I have found the agency is in itself quite interestingly “Digital”. I first contacted Euro RSCG 4D Bulgaria on Twitter, and then I used LinkedIn as my Online CV to eventually finalize the process via E-mail.
It may sound nice to you, but to be honest, it took me an incredible amount of paperwork management to make this opportunity happen. Working sixty kilometers away from Toulouse where all the administrative bodies I needed to contact were located did not make the challenge any easier. I mean, have you ever felt this terrible frustration when, somehow, you could not possibly find an important paper just THE particular day you needed it… when before it was all up in your face? Did you ever have to rush to the city hall in order to get an official document before the closing hour? And the worse would certainly be to find yourself facing a dreadful never ending line of people separating you from your grail!! Awful isn’t it? Well, what if all this could be part of the past once and for all?
If we really think about the advancement of technology today and its potential benefits to government bodies, individuals and the environment, this is definitely an attainable ideal. Some countries such as Denmark, New Zealand or South Africa have actually adopted a digital administration system and it works awesome.
In Denmark the process started around 2002 with the goal of going paperless by 2012. It did take some regulations amendments towards the electronic use of official data. But eventually the system seems to satisfy the Danish Ministry of Transport for the least.
All in all, Governments around the world have started to identify the potential benefits of switching from a paper based administration to a Digital based administration management:
- ● Making mandatory procedural forms readily available from anywhere in the world, at any given anytime.
- ● Capturing, processing, transferring, filing and storing large amount of documents without any intermediaries.
- ● Saving working space, time, mailing or shipping costs in the case of an office address move.
- ● Reduce the risk of loss or misplacement of important documents.
- ● And last but not least, reducing forest destruction.
In Bulgaria, since February 2010 the government and municipalities officially started to digitalize their administrations in a move to provide clear and transparent services for citizens and businesses that will be protected by digital signatures to avoid any falsifications. Municipalities soon embraced the trend. In October 2010 the small town of Ihtiman (14 000 inhabitants) was the 1st Bulgarian municipality to implement an electronic archive thanks to a grant from the EU project for “Improvement of Administrative Services through Development of e-Government.” We at Euro RSCG 4D salute this move towards these democratic practices as we think it could foster the implication of Bulgarian citizens in the betterment of their towns much like Paris which already involves its citizens in its developing projects so they can express their opinions.
These measures should definitely enjoy more press and television coverage as they represent potential sources of employment for the young unemployed while also reducing paper consumption in these days of environment concerns.————————————————————————————————————–
Euro RSCG 4d Bulgaria is based in Sofia, 18 Ivan Vazov street.
We are specialists in digital strategy and consultant in communication online.
Our clients are the largest companies worldwide such as Carrefour, Volkswagen, Societe generale, Edenred BACB, Eon, Solvay, etc
Our main team comprise of Nicolas Galand, Alexandre Glas, Biliana Bogdanova, Zdravko Totinov, Martin Zhelyazkov.
You can send us an email to contact@eurorscg4d.bg or find us on Twitter @4d_bulgaria