Percentage of Power

          Does a night in, cuddled up on the couch with a comfy blanket, a big bowl of popcorn and a good movie sounds like a great night? Do you struggle finding a movie that was just as good, if not better than the last one you watched? Flixster is the social network for you. It is my new go to site every time I want a new movie to watch. It allows you to browse through movies and see comments from a variety of people as well as ratings from well know critic review sites such as Rotten Tomatoes. 

As I searched through the website for different movie titles, I realised that the holder of real power for the website resides in the Rotten Tomatoes Critics, their Score and the Flixster user score. A Rotten Tomato score is calculated by the average score that was given to the particular movie by the critics, it is then put into a percentage out of 100. A high score is normally around 70%-100%. A similar scoring process is used by Flixster users, they score the movie out of 5 stars. The higher the score the more likely I was to scroll down and go through the reviews.

Image 1:  Ebert (2007)

As a new member of Flixster, I felt virtually powerless. The more movies I watched and left reviews for, the more power I felt. Not to be misled, a reviewer must remember that the true power lies with the professional review critics from companies like the New Yorker, BuzzFeed News and Cinexcepcion. Dye (2005, p.5) states that “The elite are the few who have power; the masses are the many who do not.  The elite are the few who control what is valued in society and use that control to shape the lives of others,” so in a way these critics are the elites of the Flixster world and can influence Hollywood movie success. They hold the professional knowledge of being a movie critic and can sway people towards or away from certain films. As stated by Farber (1976, p.419) “In the case of Hollywood movies, critics sometimes have an indirect influence on the box office.”

          “Power is formed through relationships made online and in person,” (Kuttainen, 2017). Flixster allows people to interact with one another with similar enthusiasm towards movies. It allows connections between people that may never had existed outside this network and for people that may not have the social connections to anyone with the same movie loving hobby. Turkle (1995) agrees stating, “He is thrilled with how much there is to explore and about being able to connect with people who would otherwise be inaccessible.”

           For the next couple of weeks, I will analyse this network and ask myself whether the true power is actually with the critics? How easy is it to fit into this community of movie lovers? Is this a cyberbully free zone? The deeper I dive into my new-found network; do I keep my current identity and love for certain style of movies or do I take on new identity to fit in with the Flixster community?

References

                Dye. (2005). BA1002: Our Space: Networks, Narrative and the Making of Place, week 2 notes [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from https://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au

                Ebert, R. (2007). Your movie sucks [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96765.Your_Movie_Sucks

                Farber, S. (1976). FILM: The Power of Movie Critics. The American Scholar, 45(3), 419-423. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41207394

                Kuttainen, V. (2017). BA1002: Our space: Networks, narratives and the making of place, lecture week 2: Power. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au

                Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.