A review for each experience: how the internet forces us to measure everything with stars

A home delivery food delivery man rejects the tip before seeing it: “Much better, answer – favorably, it is understood – to the survey that will arrive by email.” A writer offers a gift (another of his books) to anyone who writes a positive opinion about his latest novel. A hotel insists its guests to publicly rate their stay, even—the machine does not discriminate—those who complained several times and were dissatisfied, and Tinder… Tinder, like the rest of the dating applications, does not show the assigned score to each profile, but although no one—except its developers—knows very well how its algorithm works, it is clear that that figure (or that matrix full of them) exists and will determine the user's path through the application.

Although the image of the teacher who, armed with a red pen, corrects exams and gives grades to his students, still weighs, the majority of evaluations today take place in front of a screen or inside a server. There are, therefore, two types: the opaque ones, such as those from credit institutions or those from dating websites that have not yet dared to ask for reviews from previous flirts; and those that we carry out ourselves, becoming judges and critics of each of our experiences. As the philosopher Michel Foucault anticipated in Watch out and punish (1975), beyond school we will continue to be subjected to continuous examinations, more or less hidden. And as Shoshana Zuboff has more recently developed in The era of surveillance capitalism (Taurus, 2020), the trend will go further: “Our digital records include evaluations, categorizations and predictions of our behavior in millions of ways that we cannot know or combat.”

Accuracy and confidence: visible evaluations

Each device connected to the Internet collects its user's habits in the form of data with which it will later establish comparisons and predictions. That is, whenever we are online, we will be, consciously or unconsciously, issuing and receiving evaluations.

Víctor Balcells is an expert in web positioning and author of Nightclubs outside (Anagrama, 2022), and considers that unconscious metrics are more important to Google than reviews written by users. “I am referring to browsing data, for example, the time it takes to leave a page or behavior on the scroll”. Of course, he specifies, “in local businesses such as the neighborhood hardware store, the part in which the evaluations are integrated is essential and priority, since what the search engine will serve will be cards with store data with Maps, scores, telephone numbers… So, conscious bad reviews have a relevant impact for any website, but especially for local businesses.”

“For companies, digital image work is obsessive and very detailed, much more than analogue work, thanks precisely to the metrics they accumulate,” continues Balcells. And, regarding the internal functioning of these companies, what Puri Vicente, specialist in marketing, is “active listening”: analyzing everything that is received from users. “I am a firm defender of company-client communication because, well managed, a bad review can become something positive. In these cases, the client expects a reaction from the company in question.”

Although all experts agree that rating systems for products and services are an opportunity for both parties, company and customer, to offer and receive better service, the issue is very different when it comes to rating people. Just a month ago, a European agreement was reached for the regulation of Artificial Intelligence and other similar technologies. Within that agreement, social credit systems (those that would give a score to each citizen based on their behavior that could then impact that citizen's relationship with the administration) were classified as “unacceptable risks,” which implies their ban within the European Union.

However, having a visible score next to our first name, last name and profile photo is not something unthinkable or something that only happens in competitive video games. On the contrary, it is very common in sales applications such as Vinted or Blablacar, the car sharing platform. Blablacar is an example of a symmetrical rating system that has been working satisfactorily for years because both driver and passengers have the same ability to write about each other after the trip. “The key to Blablacar,” explains Itziar García, communications director of this platform, “is trust, and that trust is closely linked to the technological layer. Through a study we conducted together with Professor Arun Sundararajan, we discovered that users trust other users with positively rated profiles almost as much as friends or family, and more than co-workers or neighbors.”

In Blablacar, the most common thing—almost a matter of etiquette—is that, if everything goes well and the shared trip ends without a hitch, users exchange maximum points and a few words of courtesy, almost standardized formulas. The person in charge of the company clarifies that behind these clichés there is always a positive experience and that it is up to each user to pay more attention to the score, the text of the opinions, the level of experience or even opt only for the trips proposed by a “superdriver”, a new category for those who meet certain especially demanded requirements. And for an evaluation system to be reliable and useful, it must be renewed based on the demands of its users, have more or less public and shared criteria and measure more than one characteristic or magnitude… otherwise, it will be offering figures empty of meaning.

What cannot be rated: taste and imagination

In his essay The distinction (Taurus, 1979), the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu demonstrated that the taste or preference for some cultural products over others does not arise spontaneously, but depends on economic, work or educational factors. Thus, it is possible that certain evaluations of prestigious objects or experiences indicate more about who they value and their desire to assimilate into the dominant class than about the object itself. Furthermore, Javier Moreno, author of The transparent man (AKAL, 2022) and mathematics teacher, warns: “The ways of measuring with stars or numbers usually obey the emotional responses of the consumer or client. In most cases there are no explicit evaluation criteria, but rather the uncritical impressionism of user satisfaction is appealed to.

The mathematician and writer maintains that numerical evaluations, both invisible ones and those we make ourselves, would not be as valuable or significant as they seem because “they always hide a desire for simplification.” He is also concerned “to what extent the weighting equates the opinion of the general public with that of experts. The judgment of the latter is more detailed and inspired by objective criteria (with which one may or may not agree), so it is vitally important to qualify the numerical grade with a reasoned opinion.”

Balcells goes further and considers that our obsession with measuring everything is affecting the limits of our imagination, since, without realizing it, we would be favoring the exclusion of “the diffuse, the hybrid and the strange, which is no small thing.” Experience and thought still exceed the capacity of computer systems and, Balcells continues, “both metrics and nichification (ordering by categories understandable to robots) kills and restricts the imaginative, demands specificities and does not accept ambiguity. Furthermore, as users intuit the functioning of the digital filters in charge of distributing the content they produce, paradoxically, they adapt to them: “In terrible cases like Instagram, the dark, the strange or the unclassifiable implies bad metrics, so the People unconsciously tend to do what is bright, what is full of flesh and what is fast. I think we have all experienced or sensed it: metrics unconsciously enslave and eliminate the possibility of the imaginative,” concludes this writer who pays his rent by positioning websites and developing digital strategies.

Although it is sometimes flattering and many surveys include some type of remuneration (for example, a discount on the next purchase), becoming critics of all our transactions has consequences and a certain cost. On the one hand, we will establish more transparent, healthy and trusting relationships with some users and platforms. But on the other hand, we will collaborate with the unstoppable data market, visible and invisible, that has turned the Internet into an enormous surveillance and control device and that is also beginning to threaten our imagination.