Changing Discursive Trends in the Online Review Genre - (Utrecht Studies in Language and Communication) by María de la O Hernández-López (Paperback)

About the Book

Much has been said about online consumer reviews from both a marketing and linguistic perspective. Online peer reviews, however, have been underexplored to date. This book aims to bridge this gap by examining the discursive practices found in Blablacar, a carpooling platform that allows for peer collaboration and consumption. This book shows that the nature of peer reviews is very different from online consumer reviews, and thus a new definition of the term is needed.

Book Synopsis

Around twenty years ago, with the digitisation of almost every facet of life, most businesses started including their own review system, so that their products could be rated and reviewed. This was the first wave of online reviews, called online consumer reviews (OCRs). The emergence of the smartphone and the proliferation of social media in the 2010s, however, resulted in a new ecosystem in which peers could share their assets, review other peers and be reviewed. This is the second wave of online reviews, or the emergence of online peer reviews (OPRs). This book explores the three differentiating discursive practices found in BlaBlaCar in Spanish and in English (emotive, relational and metacommunicative) as representative of this new wave. It demonstrates that OPRs have characteristics of their own, and proposes a new definition that captures the latest developments in online reviews in the context of peer collaboration.