An App to Rate Everything, and They Mean Everything
LOS ANGELES — We rate our friends. We rate our friends' pictures. We rate our friends' status updates. We rate the restaurants we frequent. We rate the meals we ate. The shows we watched. The books we've read. Why not rate everything? Enter Jot.ly.
LOS ANGELES — We rate our friends. We rate our friends’ pictures. We rate our friends’ status updates. We rate the restaurants we frequent. We rate the meals we ate. The shows we watched. The books we’ve read. Why not rate everything?
That’s the premise of Jotly, an app that’s been out for a while but that I only recently stumbled across. I was reading a great post by Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic looking at the need to “invent a new future” and move past the usual social media paradigm for innovation. It’s a great article and worth reading. But this app is worth checking out too. As they describe in the App Store:
“Search of nearby items. Even if it’s a piece of lint, it might be really awesome. Jotly will help you find it.”
The premise is ridiculous and hilarious, and as Madrigal noted in his original post on the topic, it was a parody video. But the response was so strong that it became real. Yes, folks, you can download this app and starting rating everything.
The app is framed as a product parody, but I could easily see this being an art piece deliberately situated in the frame of the New Aesthetic. One could see it as a critique of how apps are conditioning us to see the world — as +’s and likes and points. But the strangest part of all is that it became real and naturally, it’s rated: 41 people gave it 4.5 stars. Not bad.
