Organization and Hierarchy of the Worlds of Amateur Cinema Critics

Intense amateur film critique activity can be found on the Internet. Based on a survey of the website of a large cinema portal, this study examines the main organization and hierarchy of this particular realm of participation. It first scrutinizes the gap between discourse encouraging participation – based on the promotion of amateur critique – and commercial imperatives – with a back office focused on clicks and ratings. It then analyses a sample of 40,000 reviews, including the choice of films, types of argumentation and discourse, and relations with professional critique. Finally, it models the internal hierarchies within the population of authors and shows that, with practice, a profound change takes place in their texts, which gradually move closer to the codes and rhetoric of professional critique.