Digital Business Discourse

E. Darics

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137405579
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a timely and comprehensive snapshot of the current digital communication practices of today's organisations and workplaces, covering a wide spectrum of communication technologies, such as email, instant messaging, message boards, Twitter, corporate blogs, consumer reviews and mobile communication technologies.

Part I

New Technologies: New Modes of Communication

1

“Don’t Even Get Me Started…”: Interactive Metadiscourse in Online Consumer Reviews

Camilla Vásquez

Introduction

Online reviews enable any consumer with internet connectivity to access dozens, hundreds, and sometimes even thousands, of first-hand accounts of personal experience with a particular product, service, or business. Online consumer reviews have impacted consumer behavior in unprecedented ways. Whereas previously, as consumers, we relied on the word of mouth of members of our immediate social circles (friends, family, and acquaintances) – or on the opinions of a handful of experts (for example, travel writers, film reviewers, restaurant critics) – today our access to the opinions of millions of other consumers, on virtually any product or service, is just a few clicks away. Our access to such information, and the more widely distributed nature of online expertise in general, has a number of broader social implications, including a demonstrated impact on consumer purchasing (Forman et al., 2008).

What remains less clearly understood, however, is how readers make sense of all the review information available to them (Otterbacher, 2011). It has been suggested that users tend to process online reviews heuristically rather systematically: in other words, when we read reviews, we tend to use “salient and easily comprehended cues to activate judgment shortcuts or everyday decision rules called heuristics” rather than relying on systematic processing, which requires “deep levels of engagement with the information, careful attention, analysis and reasoning” (Sparks et al., 2013, p. 2). However, not much has been written about which discourse features make for an engaging online review, or what makes a particular review stand out from dozens of reviews discussing the same product, or what features of language might capture our attention more than others. In prior work, I have discussed various forms of involvement in online review discourse. For example, in a study of reviewer identities I noted that intertextual references to popular culture sources and humor can serve as discursive strategies for establishing a bond between review writers and their readers (Vásquez, 2014a). In another study, I examined how “story prefaces” and other devices used in conversational narratives were sometimes transferred to this digital genre, and exploited by online reviewers to engage readers of review texts (Vásquez, 2012). In this chapter, I advance the inquiry into interactivity in online reviews even further, by focusing on explicit forms of addressivity. Specifically, I explore several different types of interactive strategies that writers exploit to include readers as active participants in their discourse. I argue that, in this context, such forms of addressivity function as relational work in which reviewers attempt to recruit, and/or maintain, readers’ attention and interest amid a vast field of online opinions. In some instances, these same features also serve to assert, or emphasize, an author’s credibility or authority on a given topic. Showing how reviewers use language to accomplish this can provide insights into the types of linguistic resources that go into creating an engaging online text.

In the following pages, I first define online reviews as a genre of asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC), as well as a type of social media. I then discuss the notion of “addressivity” in discourse. This is followed by a description of the dataset of 1,000 online consumer reviews from which the subsequent examples were drawn.

Online reviews

Online customer reviews are “peer-generated product evaluations posted on company or third party websites” (Mudambi & Schuff, 2010, p. 186). Scholars in the international marketing community sometimes use the term “eWOM” (short for electronic-word-of-mouth) to refer to internet-based consumer reviews. eWOM has been defined as:

Any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual, or former customers about a product or company, which is made available to a multitude of people and institutions via the Internet. (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2004, p. 39)

eWOM is perhaps the most pervasive form of user-generated business discourse today. In a world characterized by unprecedented mobility and growing interconnectivity, it has become common to rely on the eWOM of strangers, which can be freely and easily accessed on websites comprised of enormous user-generated databases. For instance, TripAdvisor, currently the most popular travel website, features over 150 million reviews. Our access to such an enormous amount of first-hand, user-generated information was unthinkable only two decades ago.

Electronic-word-of-mouth differs from more traditional forms of word-of-mouth in a number of important ways. First, traditional word-of-mouth is usually spoken, not written, and therefore reaches a much smaller, and more local, audience. In contrast, eWOM is characterized by both scalability and speed of diffusion. In other words, “information technologies enable opinions of a single individual to instantly reach thousands, or even millions of consumers” (Dellarocas et al., 2004, p. 3). Furthermore, traditional word-of-mouth is ephemeral, whereas eWOM usually leaves some type of lasting digital record. eWOM can also be considered a quintessentially “late modern” form of interaction, in that it centers on practices of consumption (Benwell & Stokoe, 2006), and it takes place in a technologically mediated form, between an author and a potentially vast audience, both of whom are – and will most likely remain – unknown to one another in an offline sense.

At the present time, online consumer reviews are a predominantly text-based¹ asynchronous (and often, anonymous) genre of computer-mediated communication, or CMC. Although they can be considered a form of “social media” (possessing the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 genres, such as being participatory, collaborative, user-generated, dynamic, and rich in information), a Yelp executive recently described online reviews as “the underdog” of social media, in the sense that they are often overlooked and taken for granted. Attention to online reviews in both the popular imagination as well as in scholarly work has been nowhere near as prominent as has been the focus on social networking and microblogging sites, such as Facebook or Twitter, for example. Certainly, as far as discourse analytic treatments of CMC are concerned, online reviews have received minimal attention. Existing publications include analyses of the discursive construction of reviewers’ expertise (Mackiewicz, 2010a) and reviewer credibility (Mackiewicz, 2010b), the formulation of complaints (Vásquez, 2011) – and, more recently, features of involvement and narrativity (Vásquez, 2012), engagement resources (Tian, 2013), and generic structures associated with highly ranked reviews (Skalicky, 2013).

As a form of social media, online consumer reviews are comprised of digital, user-generated content. Yet, they differ from other popular forms of social media, because the social ties among participants tend to be weaker on review sites than on social networking sites, for example. In this respect, online reviews are best described as a “public” rather than “private” mode of computer-mediated discourse (Androutsopoulos, 2013), and most online review sites can be characterized as more “information-focused,” rather than “relationally-driven,” communities (according to the dimensions of online communities proposed by Kozinets, 2010). However, the relational aspect is not absent from online reviews. On the contrary, even anonymous reviewers use discourse in ways that forge personal connections with their readers. Therefore, in this chapter, I use the notion of addressivity to explain some of the specific ways in which online reviewers use language to carry out relational work with their potentially vast, though simultaneously indeterminate, readership. Understanding how anonymous authors create an “interaction” with their unknown audience can be useful for business communication educators and practitioners, who might be interested in extending these findings to other genres of business communication.

Addressivity

The notion of “audience” in CMC – and in social media more specifically – varies widely according to the genre in question (Seargeant et al., 2012). Although the authors of online reviews do not typically “know” their audience, they can nevertheless design their texts in a way that signals not only an interpersonal connection between reviewer and reader, but also an unfolding dialogue between both participants. The Bakhtinian notion of addressivity is useful in understanding how this works. According to Bakhtin (1986), addressivity refers to the way that “the speaker talks with an expectation of a response, agreement, sympathy, objection […] and so forth” (p. 69). In other words, as speakers, writers, and CMC authors produce texts, they take into account the possible responses and reactions of the recipients of their texts. This anticipated, or imagined, interaction between writer and reader – and the ways in which that interaction is discursively constructed in online reviews – is the focus of the following analysis. Guidelines for business communication often recommend that authors of online texts should aim to be “conversational” in their style. This chapter offers some insights into the specific linguistic devices that are used by writers to achieve “conversational voice” when composing online texts.

Prior studies of addressivity in CMC (for example, Seargeant et al., 2012) have considered different forms of audience design among transnational, multilingual users interacting on Facebook, a semi-priva...