Today's generation just blindly accepts what is given to them and at most shrug their shoulders and make a simple tweet or remark:
It's like going into Taco Bell and say to the manager 'HEY! Your burrito sucks!!!' and he can rightfully say 'So do you bye bye!' where as a proper way is saying the burrito didn't come at proper temperature/not enough or too much ingredients (though usually the former) and the kitchen you see is a filthy mess please clean it up ASAP!.
Enough customers pointing it out the manger will HAVE to fix it or risk getting fined/shut down.etc which then Taco Bell Corporation may say 'Well nobody likes Taco Bell' which isn't exactly true. Nobody likes dirty kitchens!
If the manager just constantly hear 'Burrito sucks' it won't help him to know where the problems lie before he eventually gets inspected if he is in an area that regularly enforces such things.
It’s important to articulate the criticism and be more specific besides “the burrito sucks” as I’m sure you know but in today’s society any attempt at constructive criticism can be taken by some people as being racist, sexist, etc.
Another issue is constructive criticism is taken so personally. We comment on someone's words, story, art, it's like we physically hurt the person whose work we're critiquing. We can't separate ourselves from our work anymore. Ffs I know this and I have the same damn problem!
And, it's not just there, look at fandoms. You say, eg., "Harry Potter is an awful series" to an HP obsessive and it's like you kicked their pet. We are so stunted in our own sense of self that we have to take on the things outside of us to have any sense of our own personhood.
I think part of this may have to do with a lack of resilience owing to relatively easy lives, but honestly, I think a tremendous (and growing) part comes from more and more people growing up to be dysfunctional, mentally ill neurotics. Grow up like that and it's inevitable you'll be emotionally/mentally stunted and (unconsciously or not) look to things to fill out the sense of self that never had a chance to fully grow into being due to the environment you were raised in.
"And, it's not just there, look at fandoms. You say, eg., "Harry Potter is an awful series" to an HP obsessive and it's like you kicked their pet. We our so stunted in our own sense of self that we have to take on the things outside of us to have any sense of our own personhood."
Isn't this, more or less, the boiled-down (and patently non-sexual) original meaning of the word "fetish"?
I personally find a lot of faults with BOTW but I still love it for horsey rides. I've heard that riding a horse in Elder Scrolls sucks for example not so in BOTW where it depends on the type of horse you have AND bond values.
Your just repeating what I already posted though I didn't think about the 'racist sexist' thing but that happened to me a lot on Fanfiction.net and AO2.
You write fan fiction? What stories? I am a huge Skyrim fan. You got attacked as racist/sexist?
No I review fanfiction and get attacked by authors when I call out how the OC's mistakes are often COMPLETELY avoidable. So much head banging instances.
Oh I see. They can’t handle it. Do you see a lot of self inserts?
Yes and I keep hoping one will be good but they always have contrived situations that you feel like they are just whoring for attention like driving in a snowstorm and acting shocked they crashed or their 'TV has a portal' and instead of doing something proactive IE: Pulling the plug or flipping the circuit breaker to either the living room or the whole house: they just sit their screaming or poking at the portal.
Yeah let's poke at it! POKE POKE AHHHHHHHHHHHH IT'S GOT ME!
Also the problem is worse on A02 then FF.net in terms of not liking con crit.
Your analogy is pretty tortured but even if we accept it there is a problem of cost/benefit to trying to make changes vs just satisfying my personal needs.
If the burrito sucks I shrug my shoulders and never go back there. Instead the next time I eat lunch I go to the neighbor store in the strip mall. Because my requirement is "some calories so I don't feel like crap in the afternoon", not "a great burrito" which is kind of an unrealistic expectation from taco bell anyway.
Also I don't know enough about burritos to give meaningful criticism because that isn't my domain of expertise. I only know whether I liked it or not.
A better example is the movie Tenet. I can say that movie isn't good because I don't want to watch it again, but I don't know anything about the craft of filmmaking or scriptwriting. At the same time I got some enjoyment out of watching it once because it checks the boxes of "weird sci-fi premise, people punching and shooting each other, car chases, explosions".
But I'm not going to bother complaining about it or writing letters to the editor or anything, instead I'll just be more likely to pirate the next Nolan movie and less likely to consider seeing it in the theater or otherwise paying for it.
Reading this comment it came to my mind how the feedback chain is a bit broken in most businesses now anyway. So you go complain about this theoretical burrito, what happens? At best you get a replacement burrito that may/may not have the same issue. Does it get back up the chain that maybe if they used less sauce it would be better, even if it did, you'd be on a spreadsheet with a bunch of other random complaints that are likely to get ignored. So what do you do? You go somewhere else. I do the same thing generally.
I'll even do the same with things like customer service/tech support. I've learned it's a total waste of time to even bother for most things. Either I can fix it, I can wait for them to notice a larger issue and fix it, or I can go somewhere else. It's totally futile to waste my time being told to reboot 15 times just to be told it must be an issue on my end because that's the answer you get at the end of the script.
Something that gets lost in these discussions is whether or not someone has the authority to respond to criticism.
If you complain that your food is undercooked the odds are that someone didn't follow the procedure for ensuring the food is properly cooked, so the manager will have some authority to investigate whether or not the procedure was followed (not whether or not the procedure was correct). If you complain that there's not enough beef in your beef taco, there's nothing that manager can do because he doesn't have the authority to change the recipe to add more beef.
"Constructive criticism" is only useful and valuable when the person you're giving it to has the authority to respond to it (or relay that criticism to someone who does). Otherwise it's wasted effort. The problem we are running into now in our Managerial system is that this responsibility is so diffuse that no one has the authority to respond to it. To add more beef to a taco there will be double-blind taste tests and focus groups and marketing studies and beef pricing reports and process change studies all fed into an "advisory committee" who will make a "non-binding recommendation" to someone who has probably never even seen one of these tacos in-person let alone eaten one who ultimately has the authority to change the amount of beef in the taco.