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.
This article proposes a way to transcend the debate on the critical voice in Ethnography of Communication (EOC) and qualitative communication research more broadly. First, it demonstrates how EOC’s epistemological paradigm may prevent ethnographers from understanding their subjects fully. Secondly, the article offers a Weberian approach to rational interpretation as a resolution, replacing the concept of “culture” as an a priori explanandum with “practical rationality”. This move demonstrates the feasibility of a unified method in the social sciences capable of dismantling the artificial divide between interpretive and post-positivist philosophies and research designs. Finally, the article provides an illustration of the proposed approach based on some ethnographic data from a volunteer setting of open-source civic software production in Israel.
This article develops an updated version of formality as an analytical framework in the comparative study of communicative situations, and especially of meetings. The discussion remakes Judith Irvine’s formality framework by adding to it the explanatory principle of practical rationality as used within Weber’s Interpretive Sociology. This conceptual move provides an efficient and accurate means by which to infer the final causes, reasons, or ends of communicative situations. To illustrate this analytical approach and how it can contribute to qualitative theorization in general, the article conducts an in-depth ethnographic and comparative examination of civic software production meetings in Israel and the United States. The overall argument of the article is that practical rationality can provide a valuable means for deepening explanations of cultural difference in qualitative communication research.
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