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“We tend to herd”
: Sinan Aral, “The Problem with Online Ratings,”
MIT Sloan Management Review
, Dec. 19, 2013.

“The more ratings amassed”
: David Godes and José Silva, “Sequential and Temporal Dynamics of Online Opinion,”
Marketing Science
31, no. 3 (2012): 448–73.

As the HP Labs
: Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman, “Opinion Formation Under Costly Expression,”
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
1, no. 1, article 5 (Oct. 2010): 1–13.

Rationally, there is none
: See Nan Hu, Noi Sian Koh, and Karempudi Srinivas Reddy, “Ratings Lead You to the Product, Reviews Help You Clinch It? The Mediating Role of Online Review Sentiments on Product Sales,”
Decision Support Systems
57 (2014): 42–53. As the authors note, reviews voted most helpful, or that are simply most recent, have an impact on sales that is “much larger than the average impact of all reviews.” Amazon, of course, structures its user interface to feature these two variables, which certainly drives some if not all of the effect; a user cannot search, for example, for “least helpful reviews.”

“don't-believe-the-hype effect”
: The authors note that even “if consumers corrected for the review bias, we would still observe monotonically rising or declining curves (because the very first reviews would still be biased), but the undershooting pattern in ratings would never appear because consumers would not make purchase mistakes.”
Information Systems Research
19, no. 4 (2008): 456–74.

When a review mentions
: See Ye Hu and Xinxin Li, “Context-Dependent Product
Evaluations: An Empirical Analysis of Internet Book Reviews,”
Journal of Interactive Marketing
25 (2011): 123–33.

Context takes over
: “When book quality is held constant,” as the researchers Ye Hu and Xinxin Li found in an Amazon study, “newly posted reviews tend to disagree with existing reviews.” This happens more for long-tail products (a reviewer can make more of an impact); when the previous reviews are more similar (a smoother ocean on which to make waves); when the number of previous reviews goes up (more context to react to); and when reviews actually mention previous reviews. To show that it was not merely a statistical artifact, Hu and Li randomized the reviews and found the negative trend no longer applied. “The actual order in which these reviews are written,” they concluded, “indeed matters.” See Hu and Li, “Context-Dependent Product Evaluations: An Empirical Analysis of Internet Book Reviews,”
Journal of Interactive Marketing
25, no. 3 (2010): 123–33.

“Tastes (i.e., manifested preferences)”
: Bourdieu,
Distinction
, 49.

“paradox of publicity”
: Balázs Kovács and Amanda J. Sharkey, “The Paradox of Publicity: How Awards Can Negatively Affect the Evaluation of Quality,”
Administrative Science Quarterly
59, no. 1 (2014).

Once the book was adorned
: This also, the authors point out, rules out a simple regression to the mean explanation.

“As the band gets bigger”
: The Steve Albini quotation comes from Neil McDonald, “Fire Fighting: Steve Albini Interviewed,”
The Quietus
, Sept. 2, 2013.

“Slightly negative reviews”
: Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al., “How Opinions Are Received by Online Communities: A Case Study on Amazon.​com Helpfulness Votes,”
ACM: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on World Wide Web
(2009), 141–50.

Unlike with windshield wipers
: As Shahana Sen and Dawn Lerman note, “A consumer looking for a hedonic product will be more committed and more able to refute negative information, than one looking for a utilitarian product.” Sen and Lerman, “Why Are You Telling Me This? An Examination into Negative Consumer Reviews on the Web,”
Journal of Interactive Marketing
21, no. 4 (Autumn 2007).

“Taste is a merciless betrayer”
: Bayley,
Taste
, 5.

“The less a choice”
: Sheenya Iyengar,
The Art of Choosing
(New York: Twelve, 2010), 103.

It makes one wonder
: Wrote Bourdieu, “Tastes are first and foremost distastes, provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (‘sick-making') of the tastes of others.” Bourdieu,
Distinction
, 49.

Indeed, when people in one study
: Sen and Lerman write, “When consumers say negative things about utilitarian goods,” fellow consumers seem to “believe that these comments were more likely to be based on the reviewer's true experiences,” whereas, with hedonic goods, “consumers may be more likely to feel that reasons unrelated to the product's quality influenced the reviewer, and they were guided by internal or personal reasons.” Why these sentiments themselves should be any less
authentic
when talking about a book or a vacuum cleaner is an interesting question, but it seems that we just do not trust other people's taste experiences the way we trust their experiences with other kinds of products. Sen and Lerman, “Why Are You Telling Me This?”

A “content analysis” of movie reviews
: See Stephen Spiller and Helen Belogolova, “Discrepant Beliefs About Quality and Taste” (Feb. 4, 2014),
http://​public-​prod-​acquia.​gsb.​stanford.​edu/​sites/​default/​files/​documents/​mktg_​03_​14_​Spiller.​pdf
.

In nearly half of moviegoer reviews
: See Anidia Chakravarty, Yong Liu, and Tribid Mazumdar, “The Differential Effects of Online World-of-Mouth and Critics' Reviews on Pre-release Movie Evaluation,”
Journal of Interactive Marketing
24, no. 3 (2010): 185–97. The study found, interestingly, that “frequent moviegoers” were more influenced by critics' reviews, while “infrequent moviegoers” were more influenced by word of mouth.

Books are savaged
: Hannah Johnson, “One-Star Ratings for Book on Amazon Without Kindle Version,”
Wall Street Journal
, Jan. 18, 2010. By the time of this writing, curiously, a Kindle version was in place, and the significant number of one-star reviews shifted to more politically minded protests.

“way to give you recommendations”
: The quotation comes from
MathBabe.​org
,
http://​mathbabe.​org/​2012/​10/​18/​columbia-​data-​science-​course-​week-​7-​hunch-​com-​recommendation-​engines-​svd-​alternating-​least-​squares-​convexity-​filter-​bubbles/
.

“A quietly radical promise”
: Devin Leonard, “What You Want: Flickr Creator Spins Addictive New Web Service,”
Wired
, Aug. 2010.

“signifies union”
: Georg Simmel, “Fashion,”
International Quarterly
10 (Oct. 1904): 130–55. Reprinted in
American Journal of Sociology
62, no. 6 (May 1957): 541–58.

“everyone felt that they”
: See Jennifer Tsien,
The Bad Taste of Others
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 3. Tsien argues that in France, in particular, taste served as a kind of nation-building strategy: “The aspiration to establish France as the new world leader in matters of culture underlies many of the calls to crush examples of bad taste in their midst. In order to accomplish their goal, eighteenth-century critics needed not only to set the standard of good taste but also to assume the authority to pass judgment.”

As more people had more money
: As the sociologist Omar Lizardo notes, in the “consumer revolution” of the eighteenth century, “upwardly mobile merchant classes and aspiring middle classes developed what appears to be an insatiable appetite for consumer goods, resulting in an aestheticization of previously ‘functional' objects among the rising middle classes and the development of an incipient taste for innovative cultural productions and cultural objects.” See Lizardo, “The Question of Culture Consumption and Stratification Revisited,”
Sociologica
2 (2008): 1–31.

“burning everything you have got”
: See Charles Harvey, Jon Press, and Mairi Maclean, “William Morris, Cultural Leadership, and the Dynamics of Taste,”
Business History Review
85, no. 2 (Summer 2011).

“People who are hoping”
:
Punch
, Dec. 23, 1925,
http://​www.​middlebrow-​network.​com/
.

“Copernican revolution”
: See Keijo Rahkonen, “Bourdieu and Nietzsche: Taste as a Struggle,” in Susen and Turner,
Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu
, 126.

“social subjects, classified”
: Bourdieu,
Distinction
, 6.

were not two different people
: The novelist Ben Lerner makes this a wonderful joke in his excellent novel
Leaving the Atocha Station
.

“Taste is the basis”
: Bourdieu,
Distinction
, 6.

“The science of taste”
: Ibid., 7.

If Hunch.com had a pop Bourdieu feel
: In one paper, Liu analyzed the profiles of users of MySpace, a place where subtle, Bourdieu-like “taste performances” were displayed. See Hugo Liu, “Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances,”
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
13 (2008): 252–75. Incidentally, Matthew Ogle, a former engineer at
Last.​fm
, told me, “MySpace is where you pretend to be into something, but at Last.​fm we really knew what you played.” Interview, April 17, 2014. And for an account of how one's publicly displayed “taste performances” might actually help shift one's internal taste preferences, see Benjamin K. Johnson and Brandon Van Der Heide, “Can Sharing Affect Liking? Online Taste Performances, Feedback, and Subsequent Media Preferences,”
Computers in Human Behavior
46 (2015): 181–90.

Subsequent scholarship had cast doubt
: See, for example, Peter Jackson,
Food Words: Essays in Culinary Culture
(London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 220.

Traditional taste signifiers
: Charlene Elliott notes two interesting strands in contemporary culture. “One is the inscription of ‘connoisseur' status upon objects previously outside the realm of connoisseurship; and the second is the ‘democratization' of objects previously located squarely within the realm of connoisseurship.” In other words, even as once more rarefied tastes become more available to everyday consumption, once everyday activities become subjected to more rarefied analysis. See Elliott, “Considering the Connoisseur: Probing the Language of Taste,”
Canadian Review of American Studies
36, no. 2 (2006): 229–36.

When an executive
: For an excellent discussion of the dynamics of countersignaling, see Nick Feltovich, Richmond Harbaugh, and Ted To, “Too Cool for School? Signaling and Countersignaling,”
RAND Journal of Economics
33, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 630–49.

The anxious positioning
: An attempt that typically fails, according to one study, which found that “humblebraggers” were less liked than braggers, who were presumably being more honest. See Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gina, and Michael I. Norton, “Humblebragging: A Distinct—and Ineffective—Self-Presentation Strategy” (Harvard Business School, working paper 15-080).

“Our song has just come on”
: The example comes from Harris Wittels,
Humblebrag: The Art of False Modesty
(New York: Grand Central, 2012).

“People in our studies”
: Caroline McCarthy, “Hunch Homes In on Who You Are,”
CNET
, March 29, 2010.

“My own taste reflects”
: Carl Wilson,
Let's Talk About Love
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 78.

Rather, I was associating
: One problem with the presence of all this information online is that seemingly huge, anonymous swaths of data can be linked, without too much trouble, to people's individual-level behavior. As much as it is a security flaw, it is also a reminder of our predictability. See Joseph A. Calandrino et al.,
“ ‘You Might Also Like': Privacy Risks of Collaborative Filtering,”
2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
, May 22–25, 2011, 231–46. The authors, as it happens, included Hunch.​com (among others, such as Last.​fm and Amazon.​com) in their analysis, noting that “when optimized for accuracy, our algorithm infers a third of the test users' secret answers to Hunch questions with no error.” The inference is made by observing “temporal changes in the public outputs of a recommender system.” And when researchers in the U.K. analyzed “relatively basic levels of human behavior”—for example, publicly available Facebook “likes”—they were able to predict, at levels much higher than chance, whether people were male or female, gay or straight, Christian or Muslim. The reasons behind some observed correlations, they allowed, were oblique: “There is no obvious connection between Curly Fries and high intelligence.” Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel, “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior,”
PNAS
110, no. 15 (2013): 5802–5.

“Nothing more clearly affirms”
: Bourdieu,
Distinction
, 18.

People's music preferences
: See Peter J. Rentfrow and Samuel D. Gosling, “Message in a Ballad: The Role of Preferences in Interpersonal Perception,”
Psychological Science
17, no. 3 (2006): 236–42.

A person's clothes reveal
: This idea comes from Richard R. Wilk, “A Critique of Desire: Distaste and Dislike in Consumer Behavior,”
http://​www.​indiana.​edu/​~wanthro/​disgust.​htm
. Wilk writes, “The different social signals sent by consumption and non-consumption also help to explain why, in mass consumer society, dislikes are key in creating explicit boundaries between the individual and other people, in creating a sense of unique identity. Our dislikes and aversions are known to friends and relatives, while our likes are publicly stated in our conspicuous choices of clothes, cars, houses and other goods. Likes might therefore often take conformist, categorical forms that signal membership and consensus, while dislikes set boundaries and build distinctive personal interior identities.” In the world of the Internet, likes are what you broadcast on your Facebook page; dislikes might be conveyed via Snapchat.

“Clearly no one really believes”
: Roger Scruton, “Judging Architecture,” in
Design and Aesthetics: A Reader
, ed. Mo Dodson and Jerry Palmer (London: Routledge, 2003), 13.

The closer people are
: Wrote Bourdieu, “Explicit aesthetic choices are in fact often constituted in opposition to the choices of the groups closest in social space with whom the competition is most direct and most immediate.” Bourdieu,
Distinction
, 53.

One study, which plotted
: See Mike Savage and Modesto Gayo-Cal, “Against the Omnivore: Assemblages of Contemporary Musical Taste in the United Kingdom” (CRESC, working paper 72, University of Manchester, Nov. 2009).

“The horrors of popular kitsch”
: Bourdieu,
Distinction
, 62.

They may in fact do the opposite
: See Kevin Lewis, Marco Gonzalez, and Jason Kaufman, “Social Selection and Peer Influence in an Online Social Network,”
PNAS
109, no. 1 (2012): 68–72. As the authors write, “Our findings suggest that friends tend to share some tastes not because they influence one another, but because this similarity was part of the reason they became and remained friends in the first place.” The one music genre they found that seemed to “spread” among Facebook friends was classical/jazz, less, they surmised, due to some inherent
viral likability for the genre than because of its “unique value as a high-status cultural signal.”

humans can recognize a genre
: Namely, 250 milliseconds. See Robert O. Gjerdingen and David Perrot, “Scanning the Dial: The Rapid Recognition of Music Genres,”
Journal of New Music Research
37, no. 2 (2008): 93–100.

Genres, to paraphrase the music critic
: See Simon Frith's excellent
Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), particularly the “Genre Rules” chapter.

“At Sony records”
: The Lucinda Williams anecdote is taken from Madeleine Schwartz's interview in
The Believer
, reprinted in
Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence: The Best of “Believer” Music Interviews
, ed. Vendela Vida and Ross Simonini (San Francisco: Believer Books, 2014), 472.

Her song “Passionate Kisses”
: And the fact that Carpenter was even played on country radio stations was a bit of categorical confusion. As the radio consultant Sean Ross told me, “She was promoted to country radio because there was no place for female singer-songwriters. If she had come along four years later when Shawn Colvin and Sheryl Crow were having hits, she would have been a pop artist.”

In one Bourdieu-style exercise
: Their political affiliations were gleaned from Facebook “likes.”

“One can hear famous pieces”
: The quotation comes from Evan Eisenberg's excellent book,
The Recording Angel: Music, Records, and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 45.

“The appreciation of classical music”
: Richard A. Peterson, “Problems in Comparative Research: The Example of Omnivorousness,”
Poetics
33, nos. 5–6 (2005): 257–82.

“There's just too much music”
: Nitsuh Abebe, “The Palmer Problem,”
Pitchfork.​com
, March 25, 2011.

The old highbrows
: This idea comes from the sociologist Omar Lizardo, who argues that “omnivorousness is likely to be most unambiguously manifested as a horizontal boundary-drawing resource distinguishing the culturally advantaged from other proximate but distinct class fractions.” See Lizardo, “Reconceptualizing and Theorizing ‘Omnivorousness': Genetic and Relational Mechanisms,”
Sociological Theory
30, no. 4 (2012): 263–82.

“liking the same things differently”
: Bourdieu,
Distinction
, 279.

In places like the personals section
: In a study of personal ads in
The New York Review of Books
, the sociologist Roger Kern notes that one thing missing from the personals, which is important in Bourdieu's work on “symbolic exclusion,” is dislikes. “Perhaps the persistent use of negatives in describing one's self,” he writes, “is perceived by the ad writers that they are snobbish, contrary, and/or hostile.” He also identified an emphasis on varied cultural activities, which support “the conceptualization of a mastery of a wide range of cultural forms as a valuable personal resource marking high status.” Kern, “Boundaries in Use: The Deployment of Personal Resources by the Upper Middle Class,”
Poetics
25, nos. 2–3 (1997): 177–93.

One struggles to imagine
: As John Seabrook notes, of the phenomenon he calls “Nobrow”: “In the old high-low world, you got status points for consistency in your cultural preferences, but in Nobrow you get points for choices that cut
across categories: you're a snowboarder who listens to classical music, drinks Coke, and loves Quentin Tarantino; you're a preppy who likes rap; you're a chop-socky B-movie fan who prefers Frusen Glädjè to Häagen-Dazs, or a World Cup soccer fan who wears
FUBU
and likes opera.” From “Nobrow Culture: Why It's Become So Hard to Know What You Like,”
New Yorker
, Sept. 20, 1999.

“musical forms consume people”
: Noah Mark, “Birds of a Feather Sing Together,”
Social Forces
77, no. 2 (Dec. 1998): 453–85.

By one analysis
: See “The Death of the Long Tail,”
Music Industry Blog
, March 4, 2014,
http://​music​industry​blog.​wordpress.​com/​2014/​03/​04/​the-​death-​of-​the-​long-​tail/
. The report's author argues that the sheer variety of digital music has only intensified the winner-take-all effect: “In fact digital music services have actually intensified the Superstar concentration, not lessened it. The top 1% account for 75% of CD revenues but 79% of subscription revenue. This counter intuitive trend is driven by two key factors: a) smaller amount of ‘front end' display for digital services—especially on mobile devices—and b) by consumers being overwhelmed by a
Tyranny of Choice
in which excessive choice actually hinders discovery.”