Joseph Reagle is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. He’s been a resident fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard (in 1998 and 2010), and he taught and received his Ph.D. at NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. As a
One way of thinking about reading online comment is that it is like watching the television game show Family Feud, where two families compete to answer questions quickly.
Displays of bigotry and hate are upsetting and alienating, and so we are advised to “avoid the comments.” But our relationship to online comment is more complicated than “Comments are bad. Avoid.”
Today maximizers have an extraordinary amount of information available to them. Sites like Yelp and Amazon offer ratings in the form of stars. These ratings can be accompanied by reviews that are often haphazard but sometimes astoundingly detailed.
“Am I ugly?” This question has been asked on YouTube by dozens of young people, and hundreds of thousands of comments, ranging from supportive to insulting, have been left in response.