Emergent Self-Educating Communities in the Digital Age

In addition to the cyber youth interest, over the past few years I have been involved with multiple projects focusing on Emergent Self-Educating Communities in the Digital Age. This work has been funded by two sources, the EU Commission's Marie Curie foundation and the LINKS  iCore project. This funding has enabled me to achieve a better empirical understanding of online communities and their offline counterparts.

My research group functions as a community net lab focusing on the ways that clearly defined (primordial) communities (re)form social boundaries through the use of new media (i.e. the Internet, mobile communication) and knowledge that is constructed online. Members of the group engage in different communities (i.e. Zionist religious Jews, Haredim, Philippines in Israel, Reform Jewry, the Custodia Terrae Sanctae Franciscan order) and investigate different social aspects of their new media activities including acquiring life skills, online dating, online journalism, religious mobile app developments and more. Thus informal knowledge and its dissemination through new media are evaluated as it impacts social identities and boundaries of each community.

My research team includes, my graduate students, postdoctoral affiliates and research assistants as follows:

Nakhi Mishol Shauli
Dr. Deby Babis
Yaakov Don
Liraz Cohen
Dr. Michele Martini
Alon Diamant-Cohen
Eldar Fehl
Akiva Berger
Matan Milner
Imad Jraisy

New Article: Strategic Management of Religious Websites: The Case of Israel’s Orthodox Communities

It's been a while since I last posted. Anyway, I have just published a manuscript in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. This is a based on a study I have worked on with Professor Heidi Campbell of Texas A&M University since 2008 and draws on interviews we conducted with Jewish Orthodox webmasters. I am glad it has reached fruition and I can share it with others. You can read the full paper here


Abstract:

This study investigates how webmasters of sites affiliated with bounded communities manage tensions created by the open social affordances of the internet. We examine how webmasters strategically manage their respective websites to accommodate their assumed target audiences. Through in-depth interviews with Orthodox webmasters in Israel, we uncover how they cultivate three unique strategies -- control, layering, and guiding -- to contain information flows. We thereby elucidate how web strategies reflect the relationships between community, religion and CMC.