Wednesday, August 15, 2007

user rated

This post is not user rated, yet.
Being a digital immigrant myself, I'm not entirely used to the idea of user rating. I must admit, before acquiring my latest cel-phone, I did do research and read a lot of the user ratings for the various cel-phones I was interested in, and it helped a lot.

But, I think I may have realized another use for user ratings: general knowledge for digital natives.

I've always had ideas about what I call General Knowledge. What is general knowledge? Is it the same for everyone? Should it be? For example, I think everyone in our world (let's start with North America) should know the following: Saturn is the one with rings, who George Washington was, that Bejing used to be called Peking, that kind of thing. Of course we all know different things, but general knowledge should be the intersection of what we all know.

Now this should be the same for culture as well. Everyone should know about: Gone with the Wind, Lord of the Rings, Miles Davis and so on (this almost seems what WikiPedia has become).

I was having a discussion some natives and they mentioned that they had heard that On the Waterfront was a good movie and they thought they should see it. On The Waterfront is part of my cultural/entertainment general knowledge (at least Stanley in a t-shirt yelling 'Stella!' is), and I thought it was part of everyones'. But it turns out it isn't and these particular natives had found out about it by looking at user ratings on a movie website.

At first I was aghast. How could people user rate a classic like On The Waterfront? How dare they. What's next? User rating Charlie Parker?

But after a bit of thinking and seeing how serious they were about it, I realized that perhaps this is a good thing and maybe this is what it is about: User rating as a new form of general knowledge.

Hey if it works and keeps the information alive, so be it.

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