Map Critique: A Peek into Netflix Queues
About: This is an interactive map created by design, data, and graphics editors Matthew Bloch, Amanda Cox, Jo Craven McGinty and Kevin Quealy and published on January 8, 2010 to The New York Times’ site. I was actually shocked that it’s almost 4 years old, considering how current I feel this topic is, though I think I good way to update this map would be to recreate it with what people are currently watching instantly.
The map explores Netflix rental patterns in 12 U.S. cities by neighborhood. Powered by Google maps, the user is able to see the 50 most popular rentals by zip code, shaded by the title’s rank. You can sort by most rented, alphabetical order, as well as the title’s relative “metascore” from Metacritic.com. The toggle at the top of the map details the 100 most rented titles of 2009, according to Netflix. Clicking on each title results in a picture of the title poster/DVD cover, the metacritic score, a link to the NYT review, and a visual representation of where people in each of the 12 featured cities people are/are not renting that particular title.
Critique: Overall, I found this map to be easy to use, attractive, and chock full of information. It’s helpful that users are able to navigate the map by the title toggle as well as by location because there are then multiple ways to unpack the information in the map. I also like that we aren’t given race or economic statistics, and instead are allowed to infer using the information given. As Kittler notes in “The City is a Medium“, “Addresses, literally, create channels. They separate mountain streams from waterways, people from subjects, cities from capitals. Under highly technologized conditions, capitals scarcely need to be built; they only need to be assigned addresses” (7). I think this map illustrates this point perfectly given that it is organized by zip code, and not just by city.
Indeed, this map allows the user to create their own arguments with the information provided, i.e. what does it say about a particular area if Netflix users are renting a title that is universally hated by critics? For instance, Bride Wars (a movie I have unfortunately seen) has the lowest metascore of the bunch (24). If we look at where people rented that movie, we can assume that those households a. don’t care about/read reviews or b. the head of that household is probably a woman. The most critically-acclaimed movie on the map is Wall-E with a metascore of 94. While it’s certainly a lovely film for people of all ages, it’s largely considered to be a family movie. In New York we see that it’s the most rented title in Flushing, Queens (11371) which leads us to believe that a lot of people in this area are renting for the whole family. Further, the most rented title of 2009 by an overwhelming margin in each of these 12 cities was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, with a metascore of 70. The film was released in late 2008 and the Academy Awards are always broadcast in January. The movie was nominated for thirteen Academy Awards, winning three of them. To me, this says that the number of award nominations is the biggest reason people choose to rent a particular title.
While I appreciated the three available ways to sort the information, I think some other categories that would have been useful/interesting to include would have been rating as well as number of awards the title was nominated for and/or won. And while this would not have been an appropriate way to sort the various titles, a critical piece of information that’s missing here is the date that these titles became available on Netflix, as that certainly has an impact on how often they were rented. Similarly, I would have appreciated some visual representation of the kinds of titles being rented (comedy, drama, thriller, etc). I also would have appreciated looking at some rural areas, rather than only cities, so that users could compare rental patterns between the two, as I imagine they are vastly different. Also, not mentioned in its explanation, all of the titles included on the map were released in 2008 or 2009, so we are not given insight into areas that rent older titles. It’s also odd to me that the toggle bar lists the 100 most rented titles of 2009, but the rank only goes up to 50 on the map itself. It seems to me that these numbers should correspond.
I picked this map because of its obvious relationship to my project, and through my examination of it, I have been able to think about my map more critically. I realize that I need to be looking at the programming at each drive-in theater as a way to better understand their audience. Are they showing old films or new films? Films for children or adults? Are they offering double features?
Below is a VERY rough way in which I could incorporate the title toggle from the NYT into my map in a way that I think would be helpful: