Constructing artistic discourse: amateur reviews of amateur new media

This recent working paper seeks to understand the nature of amateur reviews of amateur new media on the Internet by studying one of the largest, oldest, and most successful new media virtual communities. This topic was prompted by previous social network, genre, and demographic analyses of this interesting new Web 2.0 phenomenon. Review of the genre and aesthetics literatures suggested a difference between experiential non-expert judgments of art and technique-related expert judgments. A thematic content analysis of n=380 movie reviews using a grounded theory approach yielded 39 variables, which were categorized and related to the previous literature. Modeling these observations in terms of review scores, social network position, and movie features found that initially non-expert judgments formed through social interaction over time into a stable technical vocabulary within the community, which resembles many of the peer-reviewed institutions of the offline world.