Between consumers and fans: Writing fan reports as a multifunctional evaluation practice

Abstract

Based on a corpus of approx. 360,000 'fan reports,' that is online concert reviews written by customers of a ticket agency, this paper analyses lexical and stylistic features of evaluative language and their social functions as means for (self-)positioning. The analysis shows that the reviews are oriented towards different and competing orders of value and their writers take different roles. While some writers act as enthusiastic fans that use the platform for building communities of shared feelings, other writers appear as consumers who judge primarily according to economic criteria. On the basis of concrete patterns of language use it is shown how the heterarchic plurality of evaluative standards is used as a resource for social demarcations.