Redundancy in Visual-Verbal Word of Mouth: How Photos Increase Visual Language Use

With camera-enabled phones, consumers can share their experiences not just in words but also in photos. Drawing on Grice’s conversational maxims, this article asks: Do photos substitute for words, following the maxim of quantity, as “a picture is worth a thousand words” suggests? Or following the maxim of relation, do people communicate redundantly across modalities by expressing visual aspects both visually and verbally? Across two large-scale data sets of more than 6.9 million consumer reviews from Yelp and TripAdvisor, two validation studies with human judges, and a controlled experiment, we find that reviewers generally communicate redundantly: While photos naturally convey visual aspects of experiences, reviewers also communicate these aspects in their text, creating redundancy across modalities. This tendency is heightened when reviewers begin by selecting a photo and when they are concerned about how their message is received by readers.