ABSTRACT
Introduction The rapid development of Internet applications and devices has greatly reduced the costs of coordinating and participating in many social and cultural activities. Over the last 15 years or so, there has emerged, through both corporate or individual initiatives, numerous large collectives producing information available to all. Beyond the paradigmatic example of Wikipedia, online video platforms, blog networks, and consumer reviews sites have together built rich data resources, based on free contributions and organized by site administrators and algorithms. These web-based platforms gather heterogeneous contributions from users, which are reconfigured through the operations of selection and aggregation, then sorted and shaped in order to make it meaningful information for their audience. Several terms have been used to describe this mechanism: “collective intelligence” (Surowiecki 2005), “wealth of networks” (Benkler 2006), and “wikinomics” (Tapscott and Williams 2005). The analyses of these authors highlight the ability of such forums to create greater value from scattered individual contributions. They emphasize the efficiency of algorithms and the coordination of technical systems that enable the aggregation of subjective and local contributions into a larger whole that is relevant for users. Overall, these systems and the mathematical formulas that support them, whether simple or complex (based on rankings, averages, recommendations, etc.), are able to build valuable assets from myriad heterogeneous elements produced. Online consumer reviews (OCRs) are a good illustration of this phenomenon. First popularized by Amazon in the late 1990s, they have since become ubiquitous on the web. They are typically comprised of a combination of a rating (often out of five, and symbolized by stars) and a written review. A product’s overall evaluation is summarized by the average rating and the first few lines of some reviews, which the user can freely navigate. OCRs are now present on a variety of sites, particularly those platforms that specialize in collecting opinions (TripAdvisor, Yelp, LaFourchette) and e-commerce sites. They cover a wide variety of goods and services, from hotels and restaurants to funeral homes, as well as books, vacuum cleaners, schools, and everything in between. By bringing together a unified representation of scattered consumer voices, the
consumer rating and review system has clearly formed a large part of our collective digital intelligence. Indeed, the creators of these sites themselves often invoke democratic legitimacy by presenting themselves as the voice of ordinary consumers. As with democratic elections, every consumer is allowed one vote, and all opinions are presumed equal. For example, the CEO of TripAdvisor has stated:
Online travel reviews have hugely changed the way the travellers can plan their holidays-they add an independent view of where to go and stay giving another level of assurance that their hard earned travel Euro is spent wisely. [. . .] That’s the positive power of Internet democracy in action.
