Beyond dialogue: Exploring solidarity as a mode of communication through a debate on readers’ comments to online news

This article aims to explore dialogic and solidaritarian modes of communication in relation to democracy that builds on communicational exchange in and with the media, and particularly in relation to online news communication. Departing from the fraud dialogue concept, it defines and exemplifies solidaritarian modes of communication, which are argued to better meet the challenges of democracy and online journalism. This theoretical discussion draws on examples from a debate on the reconstruction of the comments sections in Swedish online newspapers. The debate concerned hate speech, freedom of speech/censorship, anonymity/openness, and moderation/registration policies. I argue that solidaritarian modes of communication include and exceed dialogue through their attitude (discursive mode of address) and practice (discursive or non-discursive mode of action) of reciprocal exchange, empathy, responsibility and restitution. A particular underlining of responsibility as journalistic/editorial/publicist indicates the importance of the communicative setting, online journalism, where ‘journalism’ turns out to be more crucial than ‘online’.