Evaluating film and television on YouTube

Sociologists have long been preoccupied with how the value of artistic objects can be judged. This process called cultural evaluation has evolved within the last few decades. The most common practitioners of cultural evaluation are employed full-time professional critics who specialize in a specific art. Professional or traditional critics influence the consumption of culture in society and contribute to audience tastes. The rise of the Internet and digital media have facilitated the emergence of new types of critics commonly called new critics. They have challenged the influence of their traditional counterparts and have effectively used the affordances of social media to their advantage. The emergence of new critics has also lead to renewed interest in the cultural evaluation of film and television. This can be attributed to the rise of popular reviewing websites such Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb which have provided spaces for amateur new critics to share their thoughts. This has also spread to social media websites such as YouTube where self-professed film and television reviewers have gained big platforms. The aim of this research is to analyze and compare the ways in which new critics, particularly vernacular professionals, evaluate film and television in their YouTube reviews. Vernacular professionals are online reviewers who combine their knowledge of reviewing with unique personality characteristics in order to gain an audience on YouTube. Vernacular professional reviewers Alex Meyers and Nerdwriter1 were selected as appropriate subjects of this comparative study. A total of 29 videos by Alex Meyers and Nerdwriter1 were thematically analyzed. The analysis resulted in outlining a number of commonalities between the reviewers, a number of contrasting evaluations and some noteworthy differences in their approaches. The main findings of the study showed that vernacular professionals had some general similarities in the way they used evaluation criteria, particularly high art criteria. However, they also had some differences which revealed that Meyers and Nerdwriter1 can focus on very distinct nuances of a specific evaluation such as formal elements of a film. The analysis also showed that the unique language characteristics displayed by Meyers and Nerdwriter1 were related to the online persona which they wish to convey. Meyers’ tendency to use humor was related to engaging his audience and Nerdwriter1’s use of sophisticated language was related to his desire to break down the filmmaking process. The main conclusion of this study is that new critics evaluate film and television in complex ways and employ a mix of high art criteria, popular aesthetic criteria and their own personality.