The Spectre of “Democratization” in the Digital Age

In January 2013, film critics reacted with apoplexy to The Impossible (2012), the disaster movie starring Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor. The reviewers’ outrage was not directed at the script, performances, or aesthetic. Indeed, the write-ups of the film itself were generally good. The critique focused pointedly on the marketing campaign and, above all, the poster. The latter featured twenty fouror five-star recommendations and seven excerpts from positive notices; rather than reviews exclusively from broadsheet, tabloid, television, or radio critics, however, the longest and most prominent quotations came from “@browning_33,” “@katie_m_kelley,” and “@lisamegan4” – in other words, Twitter users, not professional critics.