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Teasing out what is going on in online reviews, as with taste generally, is a messy affair, one that Aral has grappled with for a decade. Do people in my Subaru-heavy neighborhood buy Subarus because they see lots of other Subarus, or do Subaru buyers tend to be a certain sort of person, who also happens to like neighborhoods like mine? Are there seemingly lots of slender people in my neighborhood because they are influenced by other slender people, or are people predisposed to being slender moving to my neighborhood? The only way to ever know is to pick random people from across the country, who do not necessarily want to go to Brooklyn, and put them there.

We shall return to this question in the next chapter, but for now let us consider something else that is happening at a site like Amazon as feedback accrues. Godes and Silva argue that as more reviews come in, “the more dissimilar a shopper is from the previous set of reviewers.” In other words,
taste
is happening. People are expressing their own disappointed reaction to a book, but they are also writing about other people's enthusiastic reactions. As much as they are coming up against
a thing they do not seem to like, the more unsettling occurrence is that they are coming up against
people
who do not seem to be like them.

As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued, “
Tastes (i.e., manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes.”

When the taste stakes are higher, the dissonance can seem even sharper. When a book, particularly a novel, wins a big prize, its reception by readers on the Amazon-owned user-generated review site Goodreads actually gets worse. Balázs Kovács and Amanda Sharkey, who performed the analysis, call it the “
paradox of publicity.” It is not that judges are incapable of picking good books or that readers cannot recognize their merits. In fact, books that were only short-listed for an award had lower ratings than the award-winning books—
before
the prize was issued.
Once the book was adorned with a sticker denoting the prize it had won, however, its ratings began to drop more precipitously than those for the short-listed books it had beat out.

Why the backlash against this ostensible mark of quality? Prizes can increase book sales, but this is a double-edged sword. The prize, the authors note, raises expectations; it goes from being a book you
might
like to being a book you
should
like. The prize may also attract readers whose tastes are more mismatched than those of readers who weighed in before the book got the prize. This is the
reverse
of what had happened to Netflix, in the early twenty-first century, when its movie ratings went up across the board: The films did not get better; the algorithmic matching did. With Goodreads, when books “got better” because of having prizes bestowed on them, new, potentially less well-matched readers were drawn to them, like moths to a brightly burning flame.

Not surprisingly, this often ends in dashed expectations. This might have been what happened with Groupon users on Yelp; they were more casual consumers drawn in for less than “natural” reasons. Unlike the more gently oscillating patterns of opinion the usual book on Amazon sees, the “shock” of the award triggered a spike in polarization: Not only did more one- and two-star reviews begin to enter the picture, but the number of “likes” on
those
reviews, as Kovács told me, “went up like crazy.” Middle-ground reviews—the landscape of
meh
—hardly moved the needle. Haters gonna hate, as it were. But haters also gonna
rate
.

By analyzing some thirty thousand reviews, the study bore out a long-held truism: You can be well liked by critics or by the majority of readers but rarely by both. Longtime fans of the author in question may themselves balk at the newfound popularity bestowed on “their” previous favorite. The legendarily acerbic Chicago producer and punk musician Steve Albini once described the dynamic he was experiencing as Big Black, his small, obscure band, became more popular: “
As the band gets bigger, you start having people show up to the shows who aren't really of the same mind-set, they're just there for a night out, you know?” They were people who were not only more indifferent to the band, he suggested, but indeed “people that would probably be hostile to you in a neutral setting.”

There is a rather gloomy endgame looming here, though: the artist only producing art that people he likes will like, people only drawn to artists they think they will like. Does the world of online taste open us to new experience or simply channel us more efficiently into our little pods of predisposition?

We are looking for “signals of trust” in the noise. When reviewers use their real names, their reviews are judged more helpful. What else drives that positive review of the review? As mentioned before, reviews that hew closer to the average number of stars are judged more helpful. Interestingly, that study found, the bias is not symmetrical: “
Slightly negative reviews are punished more strongly, with respect to helpfulness evaluation, than slightly positive reviews.” When in doubt, we skew positive.

But not always. There is one crucial variable that determines whether we like, or trust, negative reviews: whether something is an
experience good
(like a book or a movie) or a
search good
(a camera or replacement windshield wipers). While negative reviews in general were seen as less helpful than “moderate” reviews, as Susan Mudambi and David Schuff found in analyzing Amazon reviews, they were judged particularly harshly when the product was a book or a movie. Why? “Taste plays a large role in many experience goods,” they write, “and consumers are often highly confident about their own tastes and subjective evaluations, and skeptical about the extreme views of others.”
Unlike with windshield wipers, people might have already made up their minds about a book or a film as they scan the reviews and can filter out someone's one-star critique as a form of cognitive dissonance.

In one of my favorite one-star reviews for Cormac McCarthy's novel
The Road
, you can practically feel the reviewer trying to escape this trap with a defensive thrust:

The reviewer is tap-dancing around taste, as if even mentioning it were to utter something indelicate. “
Taste is a merciless betrayer of social and cultural attitudes,” observes Stephen Bayley, “more of a taboo subject than sex or money.”

With
search goods
, people are looking for technical information, user tips, product flaws, and the like. They may have no biases or preferences, and a negative review may signal a tangible product flaw.

The most extreme reviews for, say, an OXO salad spinner generally involve a product failure. But the one-star reviews for Rachel Kushner's
Flamethrowers
, the (prizewinning) book I happened to be reading while working on this chapter, are filled with sentences like “I think my main issue is that I couldn't relate to any of the characters.” Is that a flaw with the product or the reader? Books may fail or succeed, but not in the same way for every reader. To paraphrase Tolstoy, each unhappy reader is unhappy in his own way. On the other hand, people do not have trouble relating to their salad spinners. Then again, devices for drying lettuce are probably less personally reflective of people than the books they buy. As the business scholar Sheena Iyengar writes, “
The less a choice serves some utilitarian function, the more it implies about identity.”

Curiously, in the study of prizewinning books, the post-prize falloff in ratings was actually less for nonfiction books. Arguably, these are more utilitarian products, with fewer places for taste to intercede. It is as if we were almost instinctively wired to recognize the expression of other people's taste when we see it—particularly when it diverges from our own.

It makes one wonder whether all disliking is, however remotely,
linked to the primal disgust mechanisms mentioned earlier with food.
Indeed, when people in one study looked at negative reviews of different products—“utilitarian” and “hedonic” goods—they were more likely to attribute the reasons for negative reviews to something about the
thing
when the product was utilitarian and to something about the
person
when it was hedonic. “Taste classifies,” wrote Bourdieu, “and it classifies the classifier.” And then we classify the classification.

You might argue that reviewing restaurants at Yelp and books and salad spinners on Amazon and films on Netflix are all different things. And yet a curious meta-logic takes over online. People are generally not situating a work in its historical context or doing the other kinds of heavy lifting that critics were once paid to do but reflecting upon their own consumption experience.

A “content analysis” of movie reviews on one Web site, looking at differences between critics and online “word of mouth,” found that critics talked more regularly about plot, direction, and acting than average moviegoers (when they refer to themselves, interestingly, their reviews deviate more from the average; nothing signals taste more than the word “I”). Amateur critics, meanwhile, talked more about the personal relevance of a movie (in 33 percent of films, versus
zero
for critics).
In nearly half of moviegoer reviews, the reviews responded to film critics (quite naturally, no critics talked about average moviegoer reviews).

In short, critics talk about why something should (or should not) be liked; people talk about why
they
did like something. Curiously, critics are often criticized for trying to impose their own taste on the “rest of us,” when actually it is the “rest of us” who are most guilty of this practice.

People are now so accustomed to the reviewing mind-set that one occasionally spies a flummoxed “review” of a simple product like paper clips: “What can I say? They're paperclips!” Four stars! That a site like Amazon sells virtually everything tends to blur and flatten things.
Books are savaged because they are not available as an e-book or for their typeface. The lines of authority are made muzzy. What does the competent paper clip critic have to say about French Symbolist poetry? What are the criteria for reviewing something such as a noise machine, and from where does authority come? (One actual line: “The white
noise is a little too deep for us.”) The rise of online reviewing may be toppling the singular critical voice from its pedestal. But with its fall, taste has shattered into a thousand fragments. We are sifting through those shards, trying to make meaning of other people's attempts to say what something meant to them.

Next, we shall flip the question over: not what you say about your choices, but what your choices say about
you
.

WHAT YOUR PLAYLIST SAYS ABOUT YOU (AND WHAT YOU SAY ABOUT YOUR PLAYLIST)

 

Who does Google think you are?

There is an easy way to find out. Type “
http://​www.​google.​com/​ads/​preferences
.”

The search company believes that I am an English-speaking male, age twenty-five to thirty-four, with leading interests in “air travel” and “Action & Adventure films.” “Well, now,” I think, “how useful could this be? It thinks I'm more than ten years younger than I really am!” But then a darker realization sets in: It could be that I am simply
acting
ten years younger than my age. All my Google searches have boiled me down to a person who flies a lot and watches action flicks (often at the same time). “You don't know me,” I want to protest, with an air of Ray Charles anguish, but perhaps I do not know myself as well as my idealized self. Having this portrait played back at you can be as unsettling as seeing your reflection in the screen of your smartphone; is that really who I am?

We are, of course, more than our search terms. How much can
be inferred about
me
by my search for printer toner replacement cartridges, other than that I am a person in need of a new printer cartridge?

As Hugo Liu, chief data scientist of the recommendation start-up Hunch.​com, told me one afternoon over coffee in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood, “If someone happens to search for cats a lot on the Internet, or if someone's looking for a stroller part, how much of that is taste?” Liu, who, with thick black glasses and an artful pile of tousled hair, affects a mad data scientist look, has long puzzled over the question of how to extract, model, and predict patterns of people's behavior online. As a student of the MIT Media Lab's Pattie Maes—who, among many other things, developed the pioneering Firefly collaborative filtering recommendation systems—he was bothered by those systems' lack of dimensionality. “They hint at people but don't really represent them in any way. It's my behavior in a particular domain,” he tells me. What I bought at Amazon, what I watched on Netflix. “But what if I could create a model of people that could work across domains?”

In other words, what if you could meld what you watched on Netflix with what you listened to on Pandora; marry that up with what you bought on Amazon and other online retailers; then overlay that with the people who interested you on Match.​com and the food you bought last month; then mix in myriad personal details—the way you talked, the images you saw on a Rorschach test, your beliefs in science and God—and then take all
that
and correlate it with data from millions of other people. Might you just then begin to have a more robust way of understanding people as a tangible variable? At the heart of the question lay a larger one: Just how predictable is our taste?

This was the crux of what Liu was working on at Hunch, a site that had been formed, as its founder had described, as a “
way to give you recommendations of any kind.” Hunch
*
¹
invited the user to answer a series of simple, sometimes playful, seemingly unconnected questions: Have you ever purchased anything from an infomercial? Which of these greens would you usually prefer in a salad (images of iceberg, romaine, red leaf, and arugula)? Do you like it when the cabin crew cracks jokes on an airplane?

Initially, Hunch was meant to be a personalized “decision engine,” a way to answer all kinds of questions (for example, where should I go to
college?). But the line from how you sliced your sandwich (diagonally or across the middle) to “what Blu-ray should I buy?” could be tenuous. And how could you ever truly validate whether Hunch's ultimate recommendation was correct? It also turned out that “people loved talking about themselves” via the quirky personal questions. So Hunch “took this taste component,” Liu told me, and made it the entire site. The idea was a kind of meta recommendation engine.

Answering the Hunch questions fell, to my mind, somewhere between taking a magazine psychology quiz and playing the old artificial intelligence program ELIZA. You vaguely sensed you were being manipulated, but with a compulsive fascination you pressed on. Most questions were not indicative of anything in and of themselves; Hunch had no psychological theory about what kinds of people liked jocular cabin crews. Rather, Liu said, the questions were meant to be, above all, engaging. The average person, he noted, gave more than 110 responses. The questions were also designed to be occasionally jarring. “People have come up with baked answers for many things,” he said. Maybe they could avoid the typical biases. “If I ask, ‘Are you a good person?' it's just like asking someone if they're middle class. Everyone in America is going to say they're middle class!”

But what if you are asked, “Will you go out of your way to step on a crunchy leaf?” It is probably not something you have thought much about. Would its answer betray any greater understanding beyond itself? Rather than asking, “Are you a good person?” Liu suggests, why not ask, “Would you drink from a public drinking fountain?” Does your inclination to answer yes to this question happen to correlate with your answer to the question of whether you would ever risk your life to save someone?

The idea with Hunch was that if you asked enough of these questions—the slight ones and the seemingly meaningful ones and everything in between—and then correlated all the answers into a massive “taste graph,” a mathematical depiction showing where people and their collective preferences were in relation to each other, you could get a robust two-dimensional understanding of human behavior. You could get the “who” and the “what” and leave the “why”—why the leaf crunchers preferred Toyotas—for the psychologists.

The correlations were striking. The magazine
Wired
described a few: “People who swat flies have a thing for
USA Today
. People who
believe in alien abductions are more likely than nonbelievers to drink Pepsi. People who eat fresh fruit every day are more likely to desire Canon's pricey EOS 7D camera. And respondents who cut their sandwiches diagonally rather than vertically are more likely to prefer men's Ray-Ban sunglasses.” Whether any of these made sense, or were actionable on their own, was almost beside the point; by simply fathoming the vast web of associations, Hunch could know you. “
A quietly radical promise” is what
Wired
called it, “implying that our tastes are defined not only by what we buy or what we've liked in the past but who we are as people.”

Except it was not so radical. It was not even particularly new. The sociologist Georg Simmel, writing in 1904, noted that fashion “
signifies union with those in the same class,” while demarcating the “exclusion of all other groups.” It is little surprise that Simmel was writing in the Victorian period, obsessed as it was with social distinctions. Philosophers had begun wrestling with aesthetic taste in earnest in the salons of the eighteenth century, spurred by a rising bourgeois class in which, as the historian Jennifer Tsien suggested, “
everyone felt that they had the right to make judgments about paintings and books.”

In the nineteenth century, taste went from philosopher's rumination to social obsession.
As more people had more money, signifying who you were, socially, became a kind of game. Social and cultural identity was increasingly defined less by long-established institutions (the church, the aristocracy) and more by money—how much you had and, more important, how you spent it.
*
²
What you wore helped define who you were. And the more open to interpretation who you
were
was, the more important what you
wore
became.

“The more nervous the age,” Simmel wrote, “the more its fashions change.” Consider the Victorian “extreme makeover.” When one upper-middle-class client called on the famed London decorative arts firm Morris & Co., asking Dante Gabriel Rossetti what should be done with his home, Rossetti's answer was as swift and emphatic as any latter-day
reality television host's: Begin by “
burning everything you have got.” The client later praised the firm for saving innumerable people from “sitting on shepherdesses, or birds and butterflies, from vulgar ornaments and other atrocities in taste.”

In a novel like Elizabeth Gaskell's
North and South
(1855), the geographic divide is really a taste divide, polite London society versus the emergent merchant classes of the North. Nothing is too minor to broach the fault lines of taste—from the pattern of the wallpaper to the appropriate “number of delicacies” on the dinner table. The very phrases “good taste” and “bad taste” actually did not surface in earnest until the twentieth century (according to Google's book database Ngram). They seemed to plateau in the 1950s, when the “middlebrow” reached its ascendance (as one wag described the concept, “
People who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff they ought to like”).

But no one quite so thoroughly plumbed the taxonomy of taste—what it was, what it was
for
—as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
Distinction
, his landmark 1979 book, was dubbed a “
Copernican revolution in the study of taste.” Bourdieu created “taste profiles”—as today's Internet sites would call them—of some 1,217 French subjects. He combined ethnographic observation with an exhaustive and innovative survey, which asked scores of questions: “Which are your three favorites among the painters listed below?” “Where did you get your furniture?” He even wanted to know how people did their hair.

He tallied all that against people's demographics, rigorously and rigidly sorted into groups like “Executives, engineers” and “Clerical, junior executives” (he warned it was a very “French book”). He found, through statistical correlation, that “
social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make.” This itself was not novel, but Bourdieu emphasized just how minute these taste distinctions could run, how firmly tied to one's place in society they seemed to be, and how often they were determined less by one's wealth than by one's education.

The correlations were strong: In music, the “dominant classes” preferred works like Ravel's
Concerto for the Left Hand;
the “middlebrows” liked
Hungarian Rhapsody
(so often used in mid-century cartoons); while the “popular” classes went for “lighter” fare like
The Blue Danube
. One's “cultural” capital was a stronger predictor of taste than
one's actual capital. More than money, cultural capital bracketed people: Parisian architects liked Kandinsky; dentists preferred Renoir.

You expressed your taste not simply through the films you saw. The way you
talked
about them also served as a none-too-covert display—a “rank to be upheld or a distance to be kept”—of your cultural capital. Did you go see the latest “George Clooney movie,” or did you go see the latest “Alexander Payne film”? Talking about directors becomes a signal that you belong to a certain place in the social hierarchy. It is a subtle badge allowing admission into a kind of club, like knowing that the American designer Ray Eames was a woman and that Ortega y Gasset
were not two different people but one Spanish philosopher (two of my early mistakes).

Bourdieu insisted these “oppositions” were found not only in “cultural practices” but in more mundane things, like “eating habits.” He wanted to tear down the old Kantian divide between “aesthetic consumption”—the art we liked—and “the world of ordinary consumption”: the baser pleasures of what we ate and bought. He saw taste at work everywhere. “
Taste is the basis of all that one has—people and things—and all that one is for others,” wrote Bourdieu. “
The science of taste has to abolish the sacred frontier which makes legitimate culture a separate universe, in order to discover the intelligible relations which unite apparently incommensurable ‘choices,' such as preferences in music and food, painting and sport, literature and hairstyle.”

Hunch, in its own way, was trying to discover those “intelligible relations.” Hunch was like Bourdieu on steroids, with none of the sociological weight but with a vastly wider data set (some fifty-five million responses), spanning a ridiculous number of behaviors. It was no longer just Bourdieu's paintings and food but what kind of Christmas tree you preferred (real or fake), what sort of french fries you liked, and how you came down on the question, “Is it wrong to keep dolphins in captivity and teach them to do tricks?” Every time you answered a Hunch question, as Liu told me, “you add[ed] some kind of clarification to your coordinate on the taste graph.” In the way that GPS uses triangulated latitude and longitude coordinates to map your location on earth, Hunch had a fifty-coordinate system to place you in society.

If Hunch.​com had a pop Bourdieu feel, it is little surprise to learn
that Liu, in his MIT days, was inspired by the Frenchman. But much of that research had come from 1960s France.
Subsequent scholarship had cast doubt on Bourdieu's rigid hierarchies of class and taste; broadly speaking, many contended that taste was no longer an upper-class strategy to vertically dominate the lower classes but a horizontally dispersed system of coexisting communities of interest, of “taste worlds.”

Traditional taste signifiers had gotten a bit slippery and, in theory, more democratized. At a place like Hunch, as with other Internet startups, where everyone looked the same age, no one had an office, and it appeared that everyone wore jeans and a T-shirt, there was no immediate way to discern social hierarchy. It seemed to reflect a new rule in America: As income inequality rises, people dress more alike.
When an executive such as Google's Sergey Brin wears sandals, is this counter-signaling, dressing down to disguise his wealth? Or is it just more signaling?
My seeming disregard for my look is actually a powerful connotation of my power
. When everyone sets the same smartphone on the table, where does one discern socioeconomic difference? In the gigabytes, which are not visible? Is it the hand-tooled ostrich-skin case, with one's initials burnished in a provocative typeface, that sets one apart? Or is it that your phone has no case at all, an indicator that you care not for its fate because you will have the next version on its release date anyway? The ultimate social demarcation may be to have
no
phone.