I’ve recently “purchased” a lens adapter on ebay. It has not yet arrived; nor is there an expected shipping ETA, on the slow boat from China. But the seller, and ebay itself, both wanted me to deliver feedback on the product and my purchase experience. I haven’t done either, since in all honesty I can’t comment on a product I haven’t received; and if I don’t receive it at all, then that also becomes more data for future feedback.
But I can see where the Amazon ebook whiners are coming from, sorta. Maybe there needs to be a more distinct divide between reviewing one’s purchasing experience and reviewing the product itself. Or perhaps it’s that there’s no good feedback mechanism in place for issues related to inventory, so they use the book review system instead.
You raise an interesting point — just like the “free information” thing, it’s conflating products with their distribution. I like your suggestion of having two comment channels. A couple years ago after I received an order from Amazon, I got an e-mail asking me to rate the delivery, not the product: did they ship the right thing, was it shipped on time, was everything there that I had ordered, and (my favorite) was the shipping package sized appropriately for the product inside? (It was not.) More opportunities for feedback like that would be great, and would be of more use to the people who collect and process stats.
Won’t drive the trolls into extinction, unfortunately, but it may force them to migrate to ever more distant climes…
“…the New World’s abundance of niche-specific entertainment actually demands more cultural knowledge to navigate. The abundance necessitates curation, curation demands expertise.”
(To be fair, you should read the whole paragraph, and the whole piece, and not just this extract. I’m not trying to quote Smith out of context; I think the quote really is a good summary of his entire point.)
Wittingly or not, Smith is making the most succinct case for Bloom’s that I’ve ever read, and as a result it also makes pretty clear what bugs me about it. In practice, curation and critique — the highest pinnacle of the taxonomy — doesn’t seem to be about having expert knowledge per se. It’s about having expert knowledge about categories of things. And that, by proxy, is what gives the authority to make value judgments. For example, the ability to say “this is good because it is highbrow” and “this is bad because it is lowbrow” and have people actually listen to you and follow your advice. Or “this statement is correct/incorrect because it was written by a conservative” and “this statement is correct/incorrect because it was written by a liberal.” If you’re an Operating Bloom’s Level 6, you can put anything on either side of the “because” and make it sound not only authoritative but also inherently logical.
I don’t know if that’s what Bloom had in mind, but that’s the reductio ad absurdum world that we’re deep in the middle of these days.
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Nice post, rather thought provoking.
I’ve recently “purchased” a lens adapter on ebay. It has not yet arrived; nor is there an expected shipping ETA, on the slow boat from China. But the seller, and ebay itself, both wanted me to deliver feedback on the product and my purchase experience. I haven’t done either, since in all honesty I can’t comment on a product I haven’t received; and if I don’t receive it at all, then that also becomes more data for future feedback.
But I can see where the Amazon ebook whiners are coming from, sorta. Maybe there needs to be a more distinct divide between reviewing one’s purchasing experience and reviewing the product itself. Or perhaps it’s that there’s no good feedback mechanism in place for issues related to inventory, so they use the book review system instead.
~Joe
You raise an interesting point — just like the “free information” thing, it’s conflating products with their distribution. I like your suggestion of having two comment channels. A couple years ago after I received an order from Amazon, I got an e-mail asking me to rate the delivery, not the product: did they ship the right thing, was it shipped on time, was everything there that I had ordered, and (my favorite) was the shipping package sized appropriately for the product inside? (It was not.) More opportunities for feedback like that would be great, and would be of more use to the people who collect and process stats.
Won’t drive the trolls into extinction, unfortunately, but it may force them to migrate to ever more distant climes…
This morning, I read something that finally crystallized what it is about the Bloom’s thing that bugs me. It’s this quote, from “In the age of Simpsons PhDs, enough with the cultural snobbery” by Russell Smith in The Globe and Mail:
(To be fair, you should read the whole paragraph, and the whole piece, and not just this extract. I’m not trying to quote Smith out of context; I think the quote really is a good summary of his entire point.)
Wittingly or not, Smith is making the most succinct case for Bloom’s that I’ve ever read, and as a result it also makes pretty clear what bugs me about it. In practice, curation and critique — the highest pinnacle of the taxonomy — doesn’t seem to be about having expert knowledge per se. It’s about having expert knowledge about categories of things. And that, by proxy, is what gives the authority to make value judgments. For example, the ability to say “this is good because it is highbrow” and “this is bad because it is lowbrow” and have people actually listen to you and follow your advice. Or “this statement is correct/incorrect because it was written by a conservative” and “this statement is correct/incorrect because it was written by a liberal.” If you’re an Operating Bloom’s Level 6, you can put anything on either side of the “because” and make it sound not only authoritative but also inherently logical.
I don’t know if that’s what Bloom had in mind, but that’s the reductio ad absurdum world that we’re deep in the middle of these days.