“חזית ועורף לב אחד”: תוכן מופק־יצרכנים וחוסן חברתי בגוגל מפות

This qualitative study focuses on prosumer-generated content (PGC) on Google Maps, in order to examine how it reflects elements of social resilience. The study analyzes PGC, which focuses on different crises in southern Israel. The first concerns the COVID-19 pandemic and has led to an acute tourism crisis. The second is a security crisis, that involves the “continuous emergency routine” in Gaza envelope. In this research, 2,000 texts were analyzed over a period of 1.5 years – from February 2020 until August 2021. The texts were collected manually from profiles of twenty tourist attractions and sites in southern peripheral areas of Israel, specifically in the Gaza envelope. The findings identified frequent and dominant PGC that demonstrates a strengthening of the elements of social resilience on the Google Maps platform, and to a lesser extent also PGC that demonstrates damage to them. Online and spontaneous discourse in digital assessment and commenting platforms, specifically location-oriented platforms, has not yet been studied in the context of social resilience in Israel, and this study contributes to address this lacuna. Another contribution concerns analyzing PGC in the context of acute and continuous emergencies.