The talkback genre: Practice and the cultural construal of online commenting in Israel Michal Marmorstein a,⇑ , Jennifer Sclafani b a The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem 9190501, Israel b Georgetown University, 3700 O St NW, Washington, DC 20057, USA 1. Introduction In today’s digital culture, online commenting is a primary form of interaction. While commenting is a universal feature of the Internet, it is also affected by the local culture in which it is embed- ded. This study explores the phenomenon of online commenting in Israeli society, specifically as it is practiced on news sites. The Hebrew term for online comment is tguva (lit. ‘‘reaction”); 1 how- ever, in the context of news sites, the more commonly used term is ‘‘talkback” (/tokbek/), originating in the English phrase ‘‘talk- back”. 2 Talkback and its adjectival derivative ‘‘talkbackist” (/tokbek- ist/) are not only terms for a communicative practice and its practi- tioners, but have also come to function as metacommunicative designations of uncivil forms of conduct and the people who engage in them in the Israeli online sphere and, by extension, in Israeli soci- ety at large. Research on talkbacks has been concerned with two main issues: (1) the rhetorical strategies exploited in talkbacks (Kohn and Neiger, 2007; Weizman and Dori-Hacohen, 2017); and (2) the cultural meaning of the talkback in Israeli society (Dori- Hacohen and Shavit, 2013; Dori-Hacohen, 2016). While consider- able diversity in talkbacking practice is reported, discussion of the cultural meaning of the talkback emphasizes its strictly nega- tive connotations. The present article seeks to explain this appar- ent gap by analyzing the relation between the generic constellation of the talkback, the normative standards against which it is evaluated, and reductive semiotic processes through which the cultural meaning of the talkback is constructed. More specifically, we argue that the talkback is a genre that enables a range of communicative orientations, of which only some–the most online-adapted, we suggest–feed into the cultural concept of the talkback. Following a brief overview of previous research on news com- mentary and talkbacks (Section 2), we describe our data and meth- ods (Section 3). Next, we present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of a collection of talkbacks posted on the Haaretz news site, which aims to outline the generic constellation of the talkback (Sec- tion 4). We proceed to a discussion of our findings in relation to the metacommunicative meaning of the talkback, suggesting that a nexus of factors play a role in reducing the practice of talkbacking into a stereotypically negative discursive phenomenon (Section 5). We conclude with questions for further research (Section 6). 2. Online news commentary and talkbacks News commentary is one type of online interaction that plays a central role in mass media websites and enjoys high traffic from site users (cf. Springer et al., 2015). Participating in online com- menting involves both active and passive users, the producers and consumers of comments. Survey-based studies suggest that comment producers form a considerably smaller group than read- ers (Chung, 2008) and that each group of participants is driven by different cognitive and social-interactive motives. According to Springer et al. (2015), producers of comments obtain gratification mostly from urging ‘‘journalists to improve the journalistic quality of news items” (2015: 810), while the silent engagement of com- ment consumers is motivated by what they perceive as the enter- tainment value of online commentary. Corpus-based studies have focused on the discursive practices of comment producers, including their relational work and strate- gies for managing online discussions (Barnes, 2018; Kleinke, 2010; Johansson, 2015; Landert and Jucker, 2011; Neurauter-Kessels, 2011; Upadhyay, 2010). A recurrent finding that emerges from both these strands of research is that rational and consensus-seek- ing two-way deliberation is neither conceived of nor practiced by users as the primary goal of online commenting. On the contrary, this research has shown that commenting tends to facilitate unidi- rectional opining, often in a confrontational manner and with a crucial entertaining quality. In the Israeli context, online commenting and specifically talk- backing has been paid much attention since its inception, almost two decades ago (Manosevitch, 2011). Research has been mainly concerned with the rhetorical strategies exploited in talkbacks https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2019.100321 2211-6958/Ó 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: michal.marmorstein@mail.huji.ac.il (M. Marmorstein). 1 A less common term for online comment, coined by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, is the diminutive tguvit (‘‘small reaction”). 2 Although in Hebrew it developed meanings other than the original English denotation, we chose to keep the English spelling of talk-back, rather than using a phonetic rendering of the term, in order to be able to create transparent derivations such as ‘‘talkbacks” and ‘‘talkbacking”. Discourse, Context & Media 31 (2019) 100321 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Discourse, Context & Media journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/dcm