This study draws on interactionist frameworks of sensorial communication to analyse
product reviews on YouTube. Existing studies of YouTube review work have focused on how
vloggers manage conflicting neoliberal identity discourses such as ‘authenticity’, ‘being
entertaining’, and ‘selling’. I argue that this focus has been at the expense of the
communicative work involved in constructing products in reviews and suggest that identity
issues should be conceptually expanded through a much broader focus on communicative
action and conventions of practice. In order achieve a first step in this expansion, my
analysis focusses on reviewers’ sensorial engagement with objects and explores the
communicative processes through which they symbolically transform products into
enlivened, sensorially rich phenomena. I argue that these communicative strategies are
important for situating neoliberal discourses within ‘mundane’ actions of description and in
broader cultural practices of reviewing
