Seeking Out Peer Pressure

Seeking Out Peer Pressure

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With the “Yelpification” of culture, there is increasing strength in numbers.

Not long ago, a friend of mine, a dear man with exquisite taste, took me to dinner at Momofuku Má Pêche in Midtown Manhattan. I point out his taste because, being from out of town, he chose the restaurant on the fly, based on some reviews he had read on Yelp, the social networking site that rates everything from eating establishments to vacuum cleaners to gastroenterologists. The supertrendy place had gotten some raves.

Now, if I had the same experience with a gastroenterologist I had chosen based on glowing Yelp evaluations as I did at Momofuku, I would be checking myself into the emergency room.

My monkfish â€" a special favorite of the Yelp hordes â€" tasted like a pencil eraser. It was also so cold that it could not be described as cooked. It was deceased.

As for the destination-place atmosphere, imagine the decibel level of a Justin Bieber concert as filmed by Leni Riefenstahl. The service was haute rude. Our waitress responded to my timid questions about the oysters with a pseudopopulist arrogance that implied I was both hopelessly out of touch with the everyday experience of fishermen and boat owners, and too much a rube to comprehend the subtle distinctions of taste and class that characterized the world of the fancy shellfish.

And those fake proletarian desserts! “Compost cookie.” “Cereal milk.” “Crack pie.” The idea, I suppose, is that if you eat such downwardly mobile treats, it is only because you are so confident of your upwardly mobile status.

Yet the fact is that the crowd of Yelp reviewers had decided that Momofuku was the place to eat. And so we found ourselves eating at Momofuku.

For the pop sociologists of the period after World War II, “crowd” was a scare word, an impersonal entity that would extinguish your personality, spew contempt at your uniqueness, disable the operation of your individual instincts and judgment.

Now the “wisdom of crowds” has become an accepted platitude. “Peer pressure,” far from being a pernicious influence, is something we seek out as we race from one review site to another.

You might call this the Yelpification of culture. The goal and appeal of Yelp, and of countless similar companies, is to make everyone, regardless of income or social status, feel like a teenager trying to get into an exclusive private school that evening.

Heaven forbid that you should meet one of your friends at your favorite Thai place. No, you have to meet at everyone’s favorite Thai place. Because if your friend is like some of my friends, he or she will be Yelping the place you suggest, and you’re in big trouble if your favorite Thai restaurant has â€" unbeknown to you, who have been going there for 27 years â€" the status of the Ebola virus among savvy restaurant-goers. (“This place should be BYOT â€" Bring your own turmeric! Stay away!! Yuck!!!”)

No, you have to go to a place that has received the best reviews from lots of people, even if you have no idea who they are or what their motives might be for spending their time rating restaurants. Gone are the days when “conformist” was a slur on someone’s character. Now the idea is that if you are not following the crowd of five-star dispensers, you are a tasteless, undiscriminating shlub.

Welcome to the lonely crowd of the 21st century, both a revival of and a variation on the original “lonely crowd,” a term famously coined by the sociologist David Riesman in his best-selling 1950 book of that name.

Riesman argued that as the economy turned producers who manufacture goods into consumers buying them, the nature of society changed. People went from being “inner-directed’ to being “outer-directed,” from heeding their own instincts and judgment to depending on the judgments and opinions of tastemakers and trendsetters. Having lost touch with themselves, outer-directed souls were all alone in the midst of other people.

Of course, in one important respect, Riesman’s thesis has been radically refuted. Whereas he and other postwar intellectuals feared the conformist power of the crowd, we now fear the aberrant individual or individuals lurking in the crowd. The tragedy in Boston makes the postwar worries about mass society, inflamed by the perceived Communist threat at the time, seem trivial.

But in other respects, Riesman’s insights seem like the seeds of our own time.