The cultural meanings of Israeli Tokbek (talk-back online commenting) and their relevance to the online democratic public sphere

Abstract

Israeli journalistic websites have initiated a feature that became fairly universal: a section at the end of each article that allows readers to respond to the article and to each other. This feature is captured by the metacommunicative term 'tokbek', derived from the English phrase 'talk-back'. Although originally viewed as having the potential to promote civil participation, the tokbek soon became associated with pejorative cultural meanings that indicated its failure to do so. Drawing on the Ethnography of Communication, we provide an interpretative framework for an analysis of this failure. The main function of tokbek is the construction of the commenters' political identities, mainly as leftists and rightists. This oppositional construction takes the antagonistic form of a 'bashing ritual' that communicates radical pessimism about the possibility of political debate. Because sharing a virtual space does not necessarily facilitate deliberation, democratic culture should be explicitly addressed when discussing technological advancements.

‘Hitlahamut’: A term for unreasonable populist public talk in Israel

“…I use data from radio phone-in interactions and from online commenting to answer this question. The data were mainly collected for other projects (see Dori-Hacohen, 2012; Dori-Hacohen and Shavit, 2013), and after noticing hitlahamut a number of times in the data, I turned my attention to analyzing this term. The online commenting data are taken from a systematically crawled corpus (see Weizman, 2015), and I searched for the term and its derivatives in it and in another tool for scraping all media content in Israel.…”

“…The online commenting data are taken from a systematically crawled corpus (see Weizman, 2015), and I searched for the term and its derivatives in it and in another tool for scraping all media content in Israel. In addition, some data were collected using the scavenging technique (see Dori-Hacohen and Shavit, 2013: 363), focusing specifically on this term, to identify what it means.…”

“…Thus, hitlahamut defines the communication of the other political side, and more often, the left defines the right-wing discourse as hitlahamut . As Dori-Hacohen and Shavit (2013) argued, the main goal of the online commenting arena in Israel is to create a space in which opposition between identities is created, rather than an exchange of arguments between the two sides. Thus, hitlahamut defines the other side’s political talk, and it casts it as extreme, unreasonable and unrealistic.…”

“…7B), as part of the aggressive tokbek discourse. Dori-Hacohen and Shavit (2013) defined the term for talk tokbek and said it is designated for the online commenting arena and its overtly aggressive tone. Many commenters use hitlahamut to describe the online commenting arena in Israel as well (in Nrg.co.il out of 138 hitlahamut occurrences, 5 were collocated with tguvot, ‘comments’.…”

Learning How to Speak Like a “Native”

“…Numerous studies have used SCT to examine communication in different communities across the world (Baxter, 1993;Cohn, 1987;Coutu, 2000;Edgerly, 2011;Pratt & Wieder, 1993;Winchatz, 2001), demonstrating the amenability of this framework to a broad range of language varieties and means (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002). Furthermore, there is growing precedence for using both EC and SCT to study technologymediated communication (Boromisza-Habashi & Parks, 2014;Carbaugh, Winter, Van Over, Molina-Markham, & Lie, 2013;Dori-Hacohen & Shavit, 2013;Flanigan, 2010;Hart, 2011;Witteborn, 2011Witteborn, , 2012. I now turn to a description of how I applied this approach to the Eloqi case.…”