Adaptability in online consumer reviews: Exploring genre dynamics and interactional choices

Abstract

This paper explores ‘adaptability’ (Verschueren, 1999) as manifest in online consumer reviews, an increasingly popular and non-trivial mode of computer-mediated communication which has so far attracted little interest among linguists of various orientations (but see Vásquez, 2014). The focus is on genre dynamics in reviews of linguistics textbooks, which lie at the nexus of academic and promotional genres. As writers of reviews will have to grapple with some degree of ‘context collapse’ (Marwick and boyd, 2010), the article includes an investigation of audience design and efforts to socially authenticate reviewer personae. Findings indicate a major divide in the data between topic-oriented and author-oriented reviews. In contrast, audience-oriented reviews are practically missing; rather, imagined audiences tend to appear in the texts implicitly as similar to the reviewer, suggesting conceptions of a mass audience as well as specific groupings of general audiences. On top of the technological and communicative affordances of the retail site, I propose a notion of ‘pragmatic’ affordances, tied to the ingredients of Verschueren's pragmatic theory of adaptability, i.e., its locus, processes and status. The study increases the understanding of language as an adaptive tool in self-commodifying online environments.