Multiple-viewing stories: Constructing expertise in online film evaluations through storytelling

Highlights

• Narratives are used to construct expertise and to connect with other reviewers.

• Participants align with one another through shared knowledge and experience.

• Expertise is constructed interactionally and not individually.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the discursive constructions of expertise that take place through narratives within a realm that, before the internet, used to belong to ‘professional’ film critics. By looking at a site where people discuss cinema — The Internet Movie Database (IMDb)—, I examine how digital spaces enable their users to express opinions on this topic, and, specifically, how these participants can present themselves within a type of narrative that I have categorised as multiple-viewing stories. As I argue, by telling stories, users discursively construct a type of expertise that is grounded on shared experience and knowledge. Thus, notions such as knowing participation come to the fore.

Introduction

Amongst the several changes and affordances that the internet has shaped in the past decades, one that has remained relatively unexplored from the perspective of digital communication is the ways in which the notion of expertise has been democratised. In this sense, “anyone with an internet connection and an opinion can claim to be an ‘expert’” (Vásquez, 2014a: 188). Due to this democratisation of opinions, both the knowledge of, and experience with, something (a product, a person, a topic, etc.) are not only key aspects of online evaluations, but they also play a major role within the construction of expertise when people share their points of view (Vásquez, 2014a, Vásquez, 2014b, Vásquez, 2015). Shared knowledge and experience, in addition, constitute an essential part of narratives in their different forms (Georgakopoulou, 2016, Georgakopoulou, 2017).¹ It is with this association between expertise and stories in mind that I propose, and further explore below, how storytelling helps to construct expertise due to the ways in which it offers users the possibility to share their knowledge of specific films and align with the stances of other participants.

With these findings, I intend to contribute to research on online storytelling, which has been described as “still relatively virgin territory, particularly from a sociolinguistic and discourse analytic perspective” (De Fina, 2016: 474). Specifically, the findings depart from previous studies on online film evaluations (cf. Taboada, 2011, Vásquez, 2014a, Vásquez, 2014b, Vásquez, 2015), which have focused on the issue of experience, but have not necessarily incorporated notions such as knowing participation. As I argue in this paper, knowing participation and participation frameworks not only provide a strong theoretical support to the data: even more importantly, they constitute key elements that play a part in the discursive construction of expertise carried out by IMDb users. Thus, these concepts help us understand how participants engage with one another and the crucial role that knowledge occupies within these interactions.

Several tenets from sociolinguistic research that predate studies on digital platforms have been increasingly applied to the internet with respect to online interactions; particularly, digital communication scholars have utilised notions such as knowing participation and participation frameworks to analyse how online users interact, as well as the different ways in which they may respond to one another. However, some of them have only begun to be incorporated in the past few years and have added new perspectives to the analysis of online interactions (Georgakopoulou, 2016).

In this paper, I examine how the users in the data relate to one another based on their shared knowledge of films, which is why I focus on knowing participation as the particular way in which these posters connect and, at times, co-author their evaluations. This is done within a specific participation framework, one in which, as I will explain further, the role of the Original Poster (OP) is crucial in terms of setting out interactional practices that begin with that OP, and continue with the rest of the participants, as the OP closely follows the discussion so as to keep it going. In the following paragraphs, I explore the concept of knowing participation as a specific way of aligning online, as well as the importance that the notion of participation frameworks has in terms of shaping these interactions.

Georgakopoulou (2016: 182) defines knowing participation as a way of creating “specific alignment responses by bringing and displaying knowledge from offline, preposting activities or any other knowledge specific to the post or poster”. Even though the use of alignment mostly comes from Conversation Analysis (CA) and discursive psychology (see Guardiola and Bertrand, 2013, Stivers, 2008), its use on digital spaces can be described as “a response to a post that is viewed and understood as an act of performance that invites scrutiny and appreciation of the self as character in time and place and/or of the post as an artful activity” (Georgakopoulou (2016: 182). Knowing participation presents itself in many forms, such as commenting on selfies on Facebook or on spoof videos on YouTube, and works on the basis of shared knowledge between people, which can put “certain members of the audience in a position to align with the stance in the original posting and to elaborate on, amplify and co-author it” (Georgakopoulou, 2016: 191). Knowing participation, then, involves aligning with a particular stance; this study focuses on evaluations and, if we zoom into Thompson and Hunston’s (2000) definition of evaluation, stance plays a key role. For them, evaluation is “the broad cover term for the expression of the speaker or writer’s attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about” (p.5). Stance-talking can thus be understood as the ‘public act’ of taking a point of view (Du Bois, 2007; Myers, 2010), and, as Myers (2010: 264) himself states, taking a stance on a topic involves aligning or disaligning with someone else. Furthermore, Barton and Lee (2013: 31) describe digital platforms as stance-rich environments, as they encourage users to share, discuss, and evaluate public opinions (for a more in-depth look at stance, see Conrad and Biber, 2000, Du Bois, 2007 and Jaffe, 2009).

The importance of the concept of stance is that aligning with someone else online signifies a form of support directed, precisely, towards another person’s perspective; in the case of knowing participation in this paper, the basis for alignment is common knowledge regarding a film two or more people have watched and specific details about it (opinions about its quality, aspects of the film-watching experience itself, information about its director, actors, genre, etc.). As I explain later in this section, one of the ways in which knowing participation comes to the fore in digital platforms is through storytelling. Thus, in this article, I draw on knowing participation as a particular type of alignment, that is, one whereby people engage with one another due to their shared knowledge about a film and, through storytelling, elaborate, amplify or co-author the original post about that film.

A final important tenet, particularly if we are concentrating on how certain contexts shape the ways in which people interact with one another, is participation frameworks. As Goffman argues in his discussion of this concept, “[w]hen a word is spoken, all those who happen to be in perceptual range of the event will have some sort of participation status relative to it” (1981: 3). He specifies that participation status refers to the relation between a specific person and a particular utterance; participation framework, on the other hand, refers to all the people who are involved in that moment of speech (Goffman, 1981: 137). Goffman also proposes, focusing on the communicative process, to break down formats of production and reception, i.e., the various roles of speakers and hearers. He divides the notion of the speaker into the animator (‘the sounding box’, that is, the individual who utters the message), the author (the person that composes or puts together the message that is uttered) and the principal (the individual who takes responsibility for the utterance). The process of reception, on the other hand, entails a circle of both ratified (addressed) and unratified (unaddressed) recipients (Goffman, 1981: 226).

In this paper, I argue that participation frameworks can help us understand the ways in which the particular roles IMDb members can take in a specific discussion shape who does what. It is through this dynamic that expertise is co-constructed in the data.

As noted above, knowing participation involves shared knowledge. Within the context of discussing films, knowledge is salient: people exchange not only evaluations, but also names, dates, genres, etc. Thus, I argue that there is a direct relation between sharing knowledge and the concept of expertise. For Mackiewicz (2010), in fact, people who post their opinions online “invent expertise when they state or demonstrate that they possess the background knowledge needed to make valid assertions about the product” (p. 413). However, and even though knowledge is indeed essential when it comes to showing expertise, experience is also pivotal: as Wilson and Sherrell (1993) note, expertise can have a stronger effect on people who read or watch a review than other attributes such as trustworthiness, namely because expertise is easier to assess by the readers or viewers if they look at the years of experience using a particular product. Furthermore, both experience and emotional content (Taboada, 2011) not only inform online consumer evaluations, but also distinguish them from professional assessments.

Showing knowledge and revealing experience will encapsulate the two main elements by which constructions of expertise will be understood in this article. Along with them, participants often also incorporate emotional content to their posts; although this does not happen necessarily every time, it is the possibility of their doing so that, as noted above, separates online from professional evaluations.

Within constructions of expertise online, there is an explicit and an implicit way of signalling one’s familiarity with something (Vásquez, 2014a: 71-78). The first category consists of users’ claims that allude to their own vast knowledge, a statement that —according to both Mackiewicz, 2010, Vásquez, 2014a— tends to appear near the beginning of these reviews. These strategies may encompass self-definitions that include mentions of being ‘a professional’ in something or the use of specialised terminology. As for the implicit construction of expertise, this strategy involves giving clues about the knowledge that the user may intend to project (Vásquez, 2014a, Vásquez, 2014b). In this kind of post, one will not find overt mentions of alleged credentials - this approach is far subtler. In the specific case of films, implicit constructions of expertise can be seen in references that convey a somewhat high level of knowledge, such as connections that are made with other works by the same director, actors, a particular soundtrack composer, etc. This strategy is similar to the one that professional critics use in order to validate their ability to analyse a specific film. In this sense, as Vásquez (2014a: 77–78) explains, reviewers do not claim that they are experts: they do not tell it, but they do show it through the connections they make.

As Harrison and Barlow (2009) note, when it comes to online participants identifying one another as knowledgeable on a subject, a way to achieve this is by sharing experiences that allow users to find a common ground. Likewise, Thurnherr, von Rohr and Locher (2016: 458) point out how forum members resort to narrative passages “to write their expertise or credibility into being”. As I argue below, a prominent way by which users in the data show their knowledge about films has to do with the narratives that convey their experiences with these productions.