Menahem Blondheim

Traditions of dispute: from negotiations of talmudic texts to the arena of political discourse in the media

Abstract Israeli political talk-show debates are notoriously fierce and overtly confrontational. To understand the structures and origins of this discursive style, we apply a historical pragmatics perspective, comparing debates of current political events on a popular talk-show to a classic and historically cherished form of traditional Jewish argumentation—the oral study of the premodern Talmud—as performed through paired-study debate ( xavruta ) in contemporary Talmudic academies. The institutional environments and deeper social significance of the two speech events we compared are highly divergent: Political talk shows represent the uneasy coexistence of real-life conflict and antagonistic game, while xavruta interactions make use of a superficially adversarial format to maximize mutual comprehension between interlocutors and ultimately enhance sociability. Yet on the level of performance—in rhetorical strategy and confrontational style—they have marked similarities. Transcribed recordings of debates in these two arenas of argument were analyzed and compared, and the analysis yields a series of marked similarities in discursive attributes between the two. These similarities include: i. a marked preference for disagreement, ii. high dialogicity of the exchanges in the sense of nuanced listening and responding, iii. acceptability of occasional disruptions in the dialogicity of the conversation-flow without its breakdown, and iv. high complexity of logic and structure in argument and argumentation. Given the direction of the historical timeline, these findings suggest the possibility of a carry-over of discursive styles from the religious/scholarly milieu to the public sphere of ideological and political debate. The survival of this unique discursive style from antiquity to the present, both within and across the scholarly, educational, and public spheres, and across media of communication, would demonstrate the resilience of traditional cultural patterns in the face of radical technological, political, and ideological change.

Live Television's Disaster Marathon of September 11 and its Subversive Potential

Televisions coverage of the tragic events of September 11 can be viewed and understood as a paradigmatic disaster marathon. The salience of the attacks visual images, their exclusivity on the screen for a protracted period, and the invisibility of their perpetrators enhanced the attacks effectiveness. The paper highlights a number of problems that the September 11 disaster marathon poses to the profession of journalism and to society, and points out possible remedies for the future. It ends with a short discussion of the ways in which televisions coverage of the event both resembled and differed from the media-event model, and of theoretical aspects of its unique dimensions as a disaster marathon.

What Officials Say, What Media Show, and What Publics Get: Gaza, January 2009

This article maps the fundamental dimensions of media coverage of contemporary war. It defines and discusses three major dimensions: Arenas of war news (the homefront, the opponents media field, and international media); the main script used for positioning the protagonists (power, vulnerability and disaster); and the degree of correspondence between coverage sought by officials and that presented by the media. Here, the political and ideological nature of the regime is highly relevant. Using the case study of the fighting between Israel and the Hamas in the Gaza strip in 2008/2009, we demonstrate the interplay and multifaceted relations between these dimensions.

The medium is the joke: Online humor about and by networked computers

This article explores the uncharted territory of reflexive internet humor about networked computers. A combined quantitative—qualitative analysis of 250 texts sampled from popular websites yielded a map of the main themes underpinning this massive corpus of humor. We analyzed them in relation to three grand theories of the nature of humor — superiority, release, and incongruity — locating each theme on a matrix deriving from the theories: (i) a superiority axis, running between the powerful and weak players in the networked environment; (ii) an incongruity axis, running from the purely human to the strictly technical, and (iii) a release axis reflecting degrees of tension generated by the former two dualities. Our analysis suggests that humor about networked computers extends to a comment on the nature of humanness in a bewildering age of artificial intelligence. The communication of this reflexive comment may be shaping a global community of computer users.

ONLINE NEWS ABOUT ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

This article measures the relative attention given to Israel and Palestine in 37 leading news sites in 10 languages over two years. Findings clearly show that the Palestinian entities and Israel are the world’s most prominent polities after the United States in top news stories of international online coverage. Most news attention is given by Middle Eastern news sites, and only then by European and American news sites. During periods that attention to Israel decreases, attention to China increases. After presenting these rather surprising findings, the study considers a number of directions for interpreting them.

The Toronto School of Communication Theory: Interpretations, Extensions, Applications

While never formally recognized as a school of thought in its time, the work of a number of University of Toronto scholars over several decades ? most notably Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan ? formulated a number of original attempts to conceptualize communication as a phenomenon, and launched radical and innovative conjectures about its consequences. This landmark collection of essays re-assesses the existence, and re-evaluates the contribution, of the so-called Toronto School of Communication.While the theories of Innis and McLuhan are notoriously resistant to neat encapsulation, some general themes have emerged in scholarly attempts to situate them within the discipline of communications studies that they helped to define. Three such themes ? focus on the effects and consequences of communications, emphasis on communications as a process rather than as structure, and a sharp focus on the technology of communication, or the ?medium? ? are the most fundamental in characterizing the unique perspective of the Toronto School. This collection not only represents a crucial step in defining the ?Toronto School,? it also provides close analysis of the ideas of its individual members.

Television News and the Nation: The End?

The golden age of television news gave a large majority of otherwise diverse Americans a unified, seamless, and clear-cut image of their nation, its central players, and its agenda. Carefully scheduled, edited, sequenced, and branded, heard and seen simultaneously across America, it provided a pretense of order to the chaos that is news. The permanence and stability of the nation, as expressed in a complex way by TV news, provided Americans with an all-important sense of existential security experienced on an unarticulated emotional level. Today, a disjointed news environment is crushing the nature of network news as a transitional object. Television news no longer reassures viewers by connecting them to a surmountable world out there but carries them on a loop from themselves to themselves.

Archaic Witnessing and Contemporary News Media

As witnessing is becoming a key issue in communications and media studies, its understanding is proving more complicated and even controversial. In what follows, we attempt to simplify our understanding of the fundamental concept of witnessing by considering its meaning and role when it was a few millennia younger. We will use the biblical meaning of witnessing to trace the origins of the contemporary debate and try to see whether and how veteran notions have conditioned our understanding of the institution of witnessing. We will apply these insights to journalism, a social practice that over the last generation seems to have experienced radical shifts in its potential and practice of social testimony.

When Bad Things Happen to Good Technologies: Three Phases in the Diffusion and Perception of American Telegraphy

The telegraph was supposed to bring about a world of good. When Samuel Finley Breese Morse tried to persuade the American government to promote his telegraph, he argued that “the greater the speed with which intelligence can be transmitted from point to point, the greater is the benefit derived to the whole community.” Few nineteenth-century Americans would have quarreled with his rationale. When Morse, forecasting the ultimate impact of his invention, invoked the image of making “one neighborhood of the whole country,” contemporaries might have suspected “the crazy painter” of exaggerating the blessings of his invention, not of pessimistically anticipating the discontents of a future mass society.1 Perceptions and evaluations of the telegraph changed radically in three distinct phases that paralleled the transformations of telegraphic technology in the process of its diffusion.

Religion, communications, and Judaism: the case of digital Chabad

In their article on ‘Building the Sacred Community Online’, Oren Golan and Nurit Stadler zoom in on the latest attempts of Chabad, the extrovert Jewish Hasidic group, to harness the newest digital technologies to propagate and popularize its staunchly traditionalist reading of Jewish heritage. Also known as ‘Lubavitch’, Chabad is the Hebrew acronym of ‘Wisdom, Intellect, Knowledge’, three of the more elevated kabalistic spheres (cf. Proverbs 3, 19–20). To many, Chabad’s embrace of communication technologies looks like an example of enlisting the devil to do God’s work, though it does not look like that to them. This paradox, and Golan and Stadler’s account of its newest coming, touches on some of the most fundamental issues of Jewish communications, as well as the much broader problem of religion and communications. The general religion and communication nexus may be divided into two major themes. One is the issue of religious communications, or media theology – namely, the problem of interaction of God and humans. But it also consists of the issue of communicating religion, namely, the handling and disseminating of what the religious believe to be a divine message in this world. As we shall see, both these issues are particularly relevant to Chabad. But the more immediate context for understanding Chabad and its use of media is the universe of Jewish communications. Here too there is a duality: ‘Jewish’ connotes both Jews and Judaism – a social entity and a religion – and here too, both aspects are relevant to understanding Chabad’s media practices today.