Introduction

This introductory chapter reconceptualises word-of-mouth in terms of face-to-face oral communication versus technologically mediated word-of-mouth, as well as the subjective notion of ‘quality’. It then situates the book’s main area of discussion in relation to contemporary debates around participation, public opinion, virality, and the gift economy. This is to ground its principal intervention, which uses Bourdieu’s theories of capital and the term, borrowed from economics, of ‘fungibility’ to explain the capacity for word-of-mouth to both empower and constrain audiences within a hierarchical capitalist system like Hollywood.