Rivka Ribak

Remote control, umbilical cord and beyond : The mobile phone as a transitional object

This paper investigates mobile phone use as a medium of inter-generational communication. Research on teenage mobile phone use has tended to focus on its peer group functionality. In this paper, the mobile phone is examined as a transitional object in parent-teen interrelationships. Specifically, drawing on ethnographic work conducted in Israel among teenagers between 2000 and 2006, the paper focuses on mobile telephones as physical objects that can connect people and mediate relationships. It is shown that, for parents and their teenage children, the mobile phone is important more for the possibility of communication and less for the text or voice conversation it actually carries. Analysis focuses also on the role of the mobile phone in enabling inter-generational distance and intimacy, attending to the complicated ways in which the mobile phone is employed by parents and their teenage children. It is argued that the analysis of mobile phone practices needs to take directly into account the specific cultural contexts of production and consumption, as culture, technology and family mutually shape one another.

PLAYING WITH FIRE: On the domestication of the mobile phone among Palestinian teenage girls in Israel

This paper offers an analysis of mobile phone practices among Palestinian Israeli teenage girls, framed within a discussion about the domestication of communication technologies, women and the telephone, and Palestinian teenage girls in Israel. The paper constructs a detailed account of mobile phone use among Palestinian Israeli girls who, at the time of the fieldwork (2003–2006), used mobile phones given to them by their illicit boyfriends, unbeknownst to their parents. The analysis explores the ways in which the phone use dialectically reaffirmed and challenged intergenerational and cross-gender relationships; and reflects on the notion of ‘domestication’ as a framework for analysing mobile communication media.

Sex Differences in Pleasure from Television Texts: The Case of Ally McBeal

Data collected from 251 Israeli undergraduates are used to explore sex differences in reactions to the television show Ally McBeal. Female viewers found the show more relevant and liked the show more than did their male counterparts. The findings are discussed within the framework of reception theory, feminist theories, and the impact of cultural contexts on the interpretation of television texts.

Mobile social media as platforms in workers’ unionization

ABSTRACT This study explores the use of mobile social media in three successive campaigns to unionize workers (2012–2014) in Israel. We examine the workers’ efforts to initiate a union in their workplace as a sociomaterial process of organizing. An analysis of unionization-related Facebook pages and interviews with union activists reveals how the activists leveraged the portable-visibility afforded by social media networks (Facebook and WhatsApp) and mobile devices (Smartphones) to create and express their collective voice, achieving both mobilization of workers and recognition by management. The analysis traces how the activists tactically leveraged the portable-visibility of the media they used, fine-tuning visibility and manipulating portability during the covert and overt phases of their campaign. In the conclusion, we unpack the challenges involved in utilizing these neoliberal platforms in workers unionization efforts within the organizational setting and discuss the implications of these tensions for the study of both organizational resistance and mass protest.

Remembering Tamar Liebes

I first met Tamar almost 30 years ago; it must have been late 1987. I remember her returning from Baltimore in mid-semester and beginning to work on her monumental Spencer grant, which attempted to translate the insights gained from the study of watching Dallas to the study of watching television news. The study asked how families interpreted the news—specifically, in the days of a single-channel television with a daily news program watched by roughly 90% of Israeli population—how did hawks and doves (as we called them then), and how did Israeli Jews and Palestinians, use this single text for their particular, ideologically diverse purposes? I did the interviews. Coming from sleepy Haifa to listen to Jerusalemites speak in the early days of the first Intifada, I was horrified: Not because there were heated debates, but rather due to their absence. As against statistical evidence of generational radicalization, we identified an effective “socialization to conflict,” as we termed it, some repercussions of which we must be witnessing now. My analysis of several of these interviews grew into my master’s thesis—which was the first Tamar supervised—and later, my dissertation. By then I was already in San Diego, but Tamar came to make sure I landed safely, and we spent the first semester there writing another article together. These were intense and inspiring times. Tamar and I did not have the pleasure of working together again. But the gratifying, totally immersive experience of writing with her was a flow of excitement I never felt again— something I will probably forever miss. I was asked to discuss the notion of “family” in Tamar’s work. When Tamar wrote about the ways in which families were depicted on television, or the ways in which families watched television, both the notion of television itself and the notion of family that related to it were for the most part taken for granted. The “situation of contact” that so fascinated her consisted of “the tube,” the “family” it showed, and the “family” that gathered around it. And where there were deviations—even if they were not called that —at least there was some implicit sense of what they deviated from. It is against this background that we can more fully appreciate the contribution of Tamar and Sonia’s article, “The Structure of Family and Romantic Ties in the Soap Opera,” to the study of the cultural construction

Practicing Digitization at the National Library of Israel

In this article we offer some analytical comments on the digitization of the National Library of Israel (NLI), which has been converting materials into digital formats since 2007. This research draws upon Actor-Network Theory and is based on participant observation within the Digitization Center of the NLI. Specifically, we ask how human and non-human actors—namely scanning technicians and graphic designers, scanners, manuscripts and ephemera—are co-embedded in the production of the corpus that will likely be the basis for historical accounts in the future; and what their inter-relationships can tell us about the digitization of heritage.

The Arab Public Sphere in Israel: Media Space and Cultural Resistance, by Amal Jamal: Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. 182 pp.

The Arab Public Sphere in Israel by Amal Jamal is an important book. It focuses on an almost invisible minority, the Arab citizens of Israel, and offers an unprecedented account—indeed, a historical benchmark—of media production and consumption among them. Essentially, the book argues and documents the resilience of this national minority against all odds, namely the consequences of this minority’s active opposition to the establishment of the state and its personal and political ties with the state’s declared enemies, along with its initial physical and cultural isolation within Israel on the one hand and from neighboring Arab countries on the other. These conditions, which could conceivably lead to deterioration and despair, have instead resulted, according to Jamal, in a vibrant counterhegemonic public sphere. The book is premised on two observations. First, it qualifies Al-Haj and Suleiman’s construction of the Arabs in Israel as “doubly marginal” (p. 26), in the periphery of both Israeli and Palestinian societies. Instead of being a passive “trapped minority” (p. 26, quoting Rabinowitz), the book proposes that the Arabs in Israel have actively turned their constraints into an opportunity and resource—specifically, that their fluency in both Arabic and Hebrew allows them to engage in the political and cultural lives of both sides. This, in turn, is interpreted by Jamal as a strategic move: Bilingual minorities such as the Arabs in Israel can choose what they want to say or hear in order to promote their position in one public sphere or another. They are in a position of “double consciousness” or “inbetweenness” (pp. 27–28) that, paradoxically, gives them an advantage over the majority group (in this case, Hebrew-speaking Israelis who are exposed to their own press only). These notions form the basis for the two research projects that are described in the book. Chapters 3 and 4, the most important contributions of this work, offer a detailed account of the politics and economy of Arab language journalism in Israel from 1948 to the present. Three stories are of particular interest. The first is the establishment of Arab language dailies, sponsored by state agencies and staffed by Palestinian Arab journalists on the one hand and Jews, mostly of Iraqi origin, on the other. This story highlights the “symbolic collaboration” (p. 47) of Arabs and the dubitable participation of Jews in the state’s highly effective “propaganda machine” (e.g., p. 41); yet read against the grain, the story encapsulates the intricate, ironically intertwined life histories of journalists exiled to and within Israel. The second story is that of Arabic party journalism in general and Al-Ittihad, published by the Communist party, in particular. The narrative of Al-Ittihad, which interweaves ideological commitment with nuanced discourse and practice, is an inspiring tale of resistance through persistence. Yet in another register, it bespeaks of the difficulty in conceptualizing party press, publications that are at once the “mouthpiece” of one party or another (e.g., Al-Raya of the Abna’a Al-Balad movement, pp. 48, 69, 103–104) and a clear, outspoken voice in the midst of consumer-driven media outlets (as they are perceived by elite survey respondents; p. 89). Third and related is the story of the recent flourishing of commercial journalism, a tale that is embedded in the particular predicament of the Arabs