Recruiting Identities In The Construction Of Youtube Technology Product Reviews
Alejandro Parini, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Luisa Granato, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina
Abstract
The aim of this study is to explore the co-construction of YouTube reviews through the enactment of the different social identities that participants perform when contributing their evaluative comments that function as small reviews (Granato and Parini 2016) and therefore as components of the YouTube review as a macro text.
Online reviews are often described as asynchronous, one-to-many forms of computer-mediated communication whose primary purpose is for consumers to evaluate a product or service (Vásquez 2014). Unlike other forms of online reviews, YouTube reviews are co-constructed around the interactions that are made possible through the text-commenting facility. Based on the general notion of identity conceived as being socially constructed in interaction (de Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg 2006; Benwell and Stoke 2006), in this presentation we look at the interplay of the different Individual and collective identities that participant draw on and bring into their textual contributions when evaluating the products under review. Given that identity construction and management involves classification, which in turn involves evaluation (of self and others) (Jenkins 2008), our work is approached from a sociopragmatic perspective and takes into account the analytic tools of Appraisal Theory within the paradigm of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 2004, Martin and Rose 2008, and others) that looks at how lexico-grammatical expressions are bound up with function and meaning-making.
We carry out a qualitative analysis, with the use of observation and interpretation techniques, of the discourse and linguistic resources employed by commenters to enact the different identities that shape the construction of the small reviews that are posted on the reviewing sites. The data come from three YouTube sites and make up a corpus of 300 comments (56,600 words) posted in Spanish from December 2017 to February 2018 as reactions to three videos reviewing Apple iPhone X and Samsung Galaxy 8. Our analysis shows that the identities recruited, negotiated and contested by the participants are acted out through the functions of expressing, accepting and rejecting opinions in the process of reviewing in which evaluations of the products are intertwined with evaluations of fellow participants. These evaluations are signalled by lexical and grammatical items - mostly nominal, adjectival and verbal expressions - that contribute to the manifestation of positive and negative attitude.
Reference
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