Customer reviews suck - nuff said

Michael Marshall Smith is the best-selling author of sci-fi classics Only Forward, Spares and One of us and, writing as Michael Marshall, the Straw Men trilogy, The Intruders and Bad Things.

I know that giving a voice to the man and woman in the street is supposed to be one of the web's greatest triumphs, but there's nothing like reading 'customer reviews' to make me want to let off all the nuclear weapons in the world.

I would love to be able to turn these reviews off, to hide them on Amazon and iTunes and everywhere else, but I can't. We've all been empowered to 'have our say', and the universe is stuck forever with screen acres of the illiterate bleatings of people who've come to believe that having a forum is the same as possessing an opinion worth uttering, and who spew their bile with the pompous self-righteousness of the boring and self-obsessed everywhere.

And of course I don't mean you, dear reader — I'm sure your reviews are all terribly well-struck, insightful and charmingly apposite. I mean… all the rest of them.

My confirmed iJunkie status in the iPhone App Store, for example, means I am now heartily sick of the phrase 'Does what it says on the tin!!!' — a sturdy and unobjectionable standby at first, but now, really, stop it.

Nuff said

The one that most makes me well up with hate, however, is 'nuff said' — used to confer a god-like authority upon whatever spasm of prejudice has just been bleated from a sock-reeking bedroom in Nowheresville.

'This book sux – nuff said!' Or 'iTunes iz a rip-off: there album price is 7.99 but U can by it for 7.98 secund hand – nuff sed!'

And yes, (sic) throughout, obviously. The entire sodding internet should have (sic) after it.

These are, of course, exactly the kind of people who get livid at being charged 59 pence for a piece of iPhone software — on the grounds it 'should' be free — despite being very much not the kind of people who'd bother to learn how to code, join a development program and then spend hundreds and hundreds of hours bringing a product to market.

And there's also a reason why the man in the street is just a man in a street — he doesn't know anything.This is possibly going to be unpopular, and I'm sorry if it sounds elitist, but I simply don't subscribe to the notion that every human utterance commands respect, regardless of the particular human involved.

Polling high street strangers

Everyone deserves to 'have their say', do they? Really? Why would we think that? Why? I don't poll high street strangers for a medical opinion, nor do I trawl the food courts of malls for plumbing tips: so why do television news stations do it for commentary on foreign policy?

And why does the web do it for music and literature? Sure, you may welcome the opinion of friends on such matters (people who've already proved their critical mettle, or whose preconceptions you are familiar with, and can make allowance for) — but why should I take it from unknown randomers, who for all I know may not even have the brains to sit the right way on a toilet?