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Article Excerpt
The responses of surfers to the content of internet sites have come to be known in Israel as "talkbacks." The vigilant surfers using their keyboards to voice their opinions are, thus, known as "talkbackers." These talkbacks (or readers' forums), have brought about a novel genre of readers' responses to news items.
When the talkback feature was introduced to news sites in Israel, it was hoped that it would offer readers a chance to respond to the news and the columns published on websites, that readers would feel encouraged to express opinions, exchange views, engage in rational debate, and perhaps forge bonds of understanding based on mutual respect and openness to the thoughts of others.
But what happened was very different--almost the opposite of what was hoped for. A majority of readers/respondents used the feature to curse each other, denigrate and dismiss each other, and use terms that would make the most liberal or jaded person blush.
Some (Armstrong & Hagel, 2000) may say that this was to be expected due to the potentially tremendous accessibility the medium has afforded to innumerable writers to billions of readers. The medium is accessible to masses hoping to make a mark in the public arena in a way they never could before. This is true, but this explanation is a universal one, and it does not account for the fact that the loathsome content and style of talkbacks in Israel is much more extreme than in any other place in the world. Neither does the explanation of the fact that the medium enables anonymity (McKenna & Bargh, 2000). Even though a surfer who breaks the law may discover, to his consternation, that the cloak of anonymity is very thin, non-criminal messages, however loathsome, leave their authors in the safe darkness of the Internet. True again, but this explanation, too, is not culturally specific. Neither is the economy-based explanation, that--a bit too simplistically--puts forward the idea that in a free-market economy, talkbacks are good for business. They engage readers and thus, in the language of the business manager, they generate traffic and expose audiences to commercial messages.
What is it, then, about Israel and Israeli culture that makes gut reactions (with all that these entail) so prevalent?
One possible answer is that the talkback policies of news-sites in Israel are relatively more liberal than those of their Western counterparts. The Knesset (Israeli Parliament) has found itself having to deal with the subject during the past year or so. Legislation was proposed by a Knesset member for websites to be subject to libel restrictions which apply to other forms of media, a move which would require Web editors to assume responsibility for the content of the talkbacks submitted by surfers. The bill passed a preliminary reading, but the Knesset's Science and Technology Committee agreed to freeze legislation over this proposed "Talkback Law" in order to allow for negotiations between lawmakers and websites and allow the latter to adopt regulations designed to limit incendiary responses from surfers. The Israel Internet Association presented the Committee with a proposal that would set boundaries on online comments linked to news stories. The proposal would seek to limit the number of online responses that include personal attacks and violations of privacy, pedophilic material, incitement, and the exposure of violent crime victims' identities. Websites would also offer a feature that would allow users to complain about specific talkbacks and request their removal. In exchange for their cooperation, websites would be exempt from lawsuits relating to talkbacks on their sites. The Knesset committee voted to accept the basic stipulations of this proposal: that websites will patrol their content instead of legislation that would require outside enforcement. In spite of the relative leniency reflected from the proposal, and as was perhaps to be expected, the stories about the proposal on various websites were, themselves, followed by a torrent of talkbacks using language and pseudonyms that are the raison d'etre of the proposed law. A surfer calling himself the Marquis de Sade, for example (responding to a story on Ha'aretz on July 9th, 2008) wrote that shutting people up is a slippery slope that leads to a "thought police," and that we are becoming Iran, where church and state are one entity. He concludes that the next natural stage is women's circumcision.
The legal explanation may be a viable one, but it is probably not a sufficient one. One wonders if there is not also an explanation based on the idea of cultural context or character. As Oz-Salzberger (2007) argues:
Israeli surfers are faster and blunter than their fellow surfers, who live in societies that are more serene, and the artery that connects their gut feelings to their fingers on the keyboard is shorter. Thus, if evil seethes in all cultures, here it rises more swiftly to the surface and to the chains of responses. In this matter, too, Israel is a kind of precursor of the post-modernist camp, a fascinating touchstone for human issues of all sorts. Violence, and especially nationalist crime, evokes in the Israeli surfer a spectrum of emotions that is certainly no different from the general Homo sapiens range, but it is both sharper and more open than is customary in...
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