Computer-Mediated Communication In Rotten Tomatoes: Movie Analysis

According to Susan Herring, Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) is the communication that takes place between human beings via the instrumentality of computers (2013: 3). In a world mostly governed by information technology, CMC coexists with Face-to-Face interaction (FtF), defined by Erving Goffman (1959: 11) as the reciprocal influence of individuals upon one another's actions when they are in immediate physical presence. Unlike FtF, which has verbal interaction involving physical presence and the transference of non-verbal and paraverbal cues, CMC mostly includes written words and allow exchanges of individuals in a diversity of manners such as privately, publicly, asynchronously or near-synchronously.
Nevertheless, a merging of CMC and

This site was chosen because the focus of the analysis will be placed on the language used by reviewers to express their opinions and not on how users interact with one another. Additionally, two important marketing companies that provide demographics measurements, Quantcast (Quantcast.com; 2015) and Alexa (Alexa.com; 2015), estimated that Rotten Tomatoes is one of the most popular sites for uploading movie reviews.
The movie chosen was The Passion of The Christ, because it involves controversial issues ─ such as religion and violence ─ in relation to which the reviewers take different stances. They also include their evaluations on other aspects of the movie including acting, music, photography, etc.
This introduction is followed by the theoretical background that presents an overview on sites for online movie reviews and a synthesis about stancetaking and appraisal theories . It is followed by a section that deals with the methodology applied to the present research. The following section deals with the analysis of the annexed corpus. Then, a final section presents some concluding