Confession: since their utterly senseless redesign, Metacritic has gone from a daily (many times daily, often) stop on my web rounds to a place I barely visit. “It’s like walking through my old high school,” wrote my friend Nick, echoing my thoughts precisely. “I used to live here, now I can’t even find the bathroom.”
It’s all for the best, probably: the less brain space I devote to the numerical quantification of critical opinion that, for some folks, now seems to stand in the place of critical opinion itself, the better for my sanity. I know which critics I like and/or which ones matter, and I can just as easily visit them in their own online living rooms.
That said, I remain fascinated by how the advent of review-scoring has made the media (the new media, in particular) unprecedentedly obsessed with the role of critics — at a time when their opinion seemingly couldn’t have less influence on the paying public. This year alone, we’ve already seen flare-ups on the blogosphere over the critics who dared to sully the Rotten Tomatoes scores for “Toy Story 3” or “Inception”; the notoriously hard-to-please Armond White has become the critic that everyone claims not to care about, yet the arrival of one of his against-consensus pans is now greeted with mass re-Tweeting.