When I was thinking about the book review that we all have to write soon, one question came up to my mind. Can we trust book reviews?
After watching "The Merchant of Cool" in English class I learned a lot more about business marketing and advertisements. Now every time I watch an advertisement on TV or see an advertisement while reading a megazine, I ask a question to myself. "Is this really true? or are they just saying it?" I am the type of person who decides to buy a product on other people's suggestions. If I see "normal" people like me on the TV talking about how great the product is I think that it must be true because they are just one of the consumers like myself. But I later realize that it isn't true because people get paid to be part of the advertisement.
And then I thought about how I got to pick my reading assignment book. I was on Google searching through books on linguistics and when I found a book relevant to the topic, the first thing I did was looking at the reviews that other readers posted. I narrowed down the list of books untill I reached my final choice. I did not know if the reviews I was reading were true, but automatically believed that they were true. My mind perceived the reviews as facts, not opinions.
After I ordered my book I thought about the possibility of of the falsehood of the reviews. What if the readers who posted positive feedbacks of the book were working for the publisher or the author? What if the reviews were posted by the author himself and by those who support him? In these cases, it is extremely hard to post an unbiased evaluation of the book since the purpose of publication is to make money. Mr. Lazarow mentioned the importance of pathos of the critique when it comes to book reviews; however, unfortunately, I cannot name a single book critique who is known for unbiased evaluation.
If everything we see on TV, internet, megazines, and many other things, can be false and biased, what can we possibly trust when it comes to making decisions such as buying products to selecting colleges? (I recently noticed that colleges do a lot of advertising, too!)
Joanne Park
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In Language in Thought and Action, Hayakawa talks about how people make decisions like the one you did. He says people often accept opinions and judgments (like a review, they judge the book) as facts, or reports, because it is more convenient to do so. For the convenience of others, an unspoken agreement has been made by society to attempt to be as honest as possible when sharing information. Of course, advertisers are exempt because they must fudge the truth to sell their product, but even they have to have some kind of accountability or you won't buy the product again. Hopefully, the reviews are accurate, but you can never be sure.
ReplyDelete~Becca LaRosa
It might be cynical, but I don't think that any brand or company can really be trusted. It's not out of convenience that we choose to listen to reviews and advertisements, but out of necessity. Although we do make the final call on what we buy, I think that decision is made with the hope that the product we invest in belongs to the company that lied the least to us. In many cases, we listen to and trust reviews and advertisements not because we want to, but because we need to trust in them to get by in the day to day world.
ReplyDelete-Tara
This reminded me of something I wrote in my book, "Drive Yourself Sane". It was discussing how nothing but direct observation of something can be considered 'fact', when it said, "Of course, we can only make inferences... our only 'facts' involve the words we read in our newspaper; your only 'facts' involve the words you read on this page." Next to this I wrote, "So then how do I know that what you're telling me is true?" If the authors are telling their readers that the words they read everywhere are not necessarily true, how do they expect the readers to believe that the concepts they are describing in the book are true?
ReplyDeleteYour comment on colleges also reminded me of an experience I had last week. I was at a presentation by UVA, and the man who was speaking said, "All that mail you get from the colleges is the same. Some pictures with people laughing and looking happy, some statistics, something about diversity..." If all of these are the same, and it is not possible that all colleges are the same, we cannot know what the college is really like through only the flyers or the website. It comes back to the concept in my book: observation. To know what the college is really like, we must visit and observe it. Only then can we get the 'facts'.
-Audrey
Audrey's comment reminds me of the whole over-arching idea of perception. The presenter's point was that all colleges are "the same". Arguably, they are, as they all give us an education. But our perceptions of them are different. And our different perceptions give rise to different opinions, causing us to choose a school that we believe is most suited to us. And again, our "best" viewpoint comes from adequate observation. Our own senses are our most objective reporters. This can apply to advertising as well - ignoring other's say and advertisers' bias will give us the most accurate information about a product.
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