Amit Schejter

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev | bgu · Department of Communication Studies

This study suggests a method to analyze, theorize, and conceptualize public participation in policymaking. Participation is a fundamental component of democracy and is derived from the right to actualize the public's sovereignty by participating in the shaping of collective life. Empirically focusing on consultation procedures that were integrated...

In this study we focus on internet nonuse among Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jewish women, members of a community that either refrains from using the internet or deploys content-filtering when it does access it in some situations. We conducted in-depth interviews to empirically answer two questions: First, how do ultra-Orthodox women perceive their inter...

The second section of the introductory part describes the context of life in Israel and the West Bank as well as some background to the creation of this fractured reality. Since each chapter describes the specific community in which a study was conducted, this part of the introduction only provides a general overview of these communities, the conte...

Findings from a participatory action study conducted with two groups of Arab-Israeli teachers help discuss the ways digital role-playing games (DRPG) enable the realization of the capabilities required to implement their professional duty of facilitating critical discussions regarding issues of social and political inequality, distributive justice...

Mass media serve as a vital communication resource as they can enable the realization of seven unique capabilities: “to be informed,” “to be secure,” “identity and belonging,” “voicing,” “identification and imitation,” “civil participation,” and “pleasure and entertainment.” The chapter discusses empirical findings based on a quantitative content a...

The concluding chapter discusses the implications of the case studies and presents a unified theoretical approach describing the commonalities and differences among the media, the technologies, and the communities. It proposes principles for a policy agenda for the betterment of the lives of these and other communities in the position of inequality...

This chapter examines the potential role that ICTs can play in realizing the capabilities of ultra-Orthodox Haredi women in Israel. The Haredi community in Israel constitutes 13 percent of the Israeli population (1,125,000 people) and is characterized by a religiously motivated insulated existence that often views ICTs as an external threat to the...

This chapter discusses non-violent Palestinian activists in the occupied West Bank and their realization of capabilities through the social networking application Facebook. Social networking applications such as Facebook serve as a vital digital resource as they can enable important capabilities due to their unique technological characteristics. Th...

This chapter examines the potential role that ICTs can play in realizing the capabilities of Ethiopian immigrant activists of the Zera Beta Israel community in Israeli absorption centers. The Ethiopian immigrant community in Israel which constitutes 1.7 percent of the Israeli population (155 thousand people) suffers systematic exclusion and discrim...

The first section of the introductory part describes how underlying philosophies and the characteristics of ICTs lead to the design of ICT policy aiming at creating fair and just solutions. It dwells on the dominant theoretical foundation that has been guiding national communication policies since the advent of the modern state—utilitarianism—and o...

The iNakba is a tri-lingual—Arabic, Hebrew, and English—mobile application based on GPS navigation technology that helps people learn about the Palestinian Nakba. The Nakba (in Arabic, “catastrophe”) is the Palestinian term for the events that took place before, during, and after the 1948 war. Launched in 2014 by the Israeli NGO Zochrot (Hebrew for...

The 4500 strong Bnei Menashe community who immigrated to Israel from India are characterized by low levels of education and income among other socio-economic factors covering all areas of life. The data in this chapter was gathered in 15 semi-structured interviews conducted with individuals from the Bnei Menashe immigrant community in Israel as we...

Interviews, site visits, and observations were used in the study described in this chapter to describe the realization of the capability “to be informed” by the asylum seeker and refugee community in Israel. We identified how asylum seekers and refugees in Israel have constructed a media environment based on their self-identification as “others.” T...

The Bedouin community—which is often defined as a subpopulation of the Palestinian minority population in Israel—suffers systematic discrimination, exclusion, and socio-economic gaps in all areas of life, as discussed also in Chap. 2 and in Chap. 4. This chapter utilizes the capabilities approach and its focus on the individual’s development as a m...

Journalism is one of the mass media’s central institutions. It thus plays a central role in the realization of capabilities by media consumers. While the previous chapter looked at the Arab-Israeli audience consuming mass media’s journalistic product, this chapter examines the role that journalists from the Bedouin community play in realizing their...

Leading up to Israel’s eighth decade, its media environment is rich and dynamic; however, the framework in which these media operate has not been as liberal as the large number of outlets may suggest. Upon its foundation, Israel had a vibrant printed press market, which was subject to a licensing regime and developed a close relationship with the m...

Can a right to memory be counted among the rights society needs to safeguard, if so, what are its theoretical and conceptual foundations, and how do they relate to communications? We answer these questions by offering a new perspective regarding the right’s components, origin and justifications, the mechanisms needed to realize it and the legal fra...

This study examines how media representations of Palestinian-Israeli politicians, can help community members realize their capabilities. The study's database is comprised of 1,207 interviews conducted with Palestinian-Israeli politicians on news and current affairs programs on the three national television channels and the two national radio statio...

The study examines how media-portrayals of Palestinian–Israeli women, can help community members realize their capabilities. We present a comparison of the frequency and context of appearances, between different media institutions, public and commercial, and between different media technologies, radio and television, based on a sample that includes...

Dramatic changes in media law and practice took place on Israel’s 70th year of independence: The Press Ordinance was abolished; the Broadcasting Authority (IBA) was replaced by the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation (IBC); and the Second Authority Law (which governs commercial broadcasting) was amended, abolishing the “dual broadcasting model” establ...

This study critiques and analyses the meaning and design of the term “public interest” as it has been constructed in commercial television policy in Israel. Its main thesis is that the term serves Israeli policymakers to achieve economic goals. This endpoint marks the transition the public interest consideration has undergone from its initial ident...

For decades, attempts have been made to define a 'right to communicate'. The rise of media technologies, which are characterized by abundance of channels and information, interactivity, mobility, and multimediated messaging, has allowed to rethink this right in a context converging traditional media and telecommunications and referring to communica...

This study investigates how the media-portrayal of Palestinian-Israelis in the context of violence and crime, hinders Palestinian-Israelis' abilities to realize their capabilities. Capabilities refer to what each individual is able to do or be representing their human freedom and wellbeing. The study presents a quantitative content analysis of Pale...

This study examines how media representations of Palestinian–Israelis differ between broadcast media outlets and their social networking sites, using the “capabilities approach” as the theoretical framework. The study presents a quantitative content analysis comparison of the frequency and context of appearances of Palestinian–Israeli interviewees...

The journal of "Israel Studies in Language and Society" / כתב העת "עיונים בשפה וחברה" הבעת קול היא יכולת הפרט לשתף את נסיבות חייו ולהישמע בזמן שהוא עושה זאת. לפיכך היא ממלאת תפקיד חיוני בתפקוד האנושי ומזוהה כיכולת מרכזית שמימושה חיוני להבטחת שלומותו של היחיד. לפי ״גישת היכולות״ – התיאוריה שבבסיס מחקר זה – יכולות הן מה שהאדם רוצה להיות או לעשות, ו...

Legal and regulatory edicts that apply to archives focus on the value of the archival matter. The case study at the heart of this study discusses the rules pertaining to archives under Israeli law and analyzes them through a novel theoretical perspective that sees public depositories of information as media that partake in the creation and sustenan...

The “Bnei Menashe” are a marginalized community that immigrated from India to Israel. The community has diverse information needs, yet they are characterized by difficulties that prevent them from acquiring vital information. In this study, we utilized Sen’s (1993) “capabilities approach” as well as Friedland et al. (2012) “critical information nee...

The consistent underrepresentation and misrepresentation of Palestinian Israelis in Israeli media have been assumed to hinder Palestinian Israelis' ability to realize their communication capabilities. We set out to understand how Palestinian Israeli individuals see their representation in the media as an issue of capabilities' realization and its e...

This study presents a theoretical model that incorporates the theories of Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal and Amartya Sen and uses their ideas to create an innovative digital role-playing game for teachers on 'To-Be-Education,' a platform originally designed for teacher-student role-playing. We then demonstrate how Sen's 'capabilities approach', Freire'...

Learning in a networked society is presented in this symposium with the basic assumption that “schooling” and “society” cannot be considered as separate entities and should bring together the theoretical and practical tools of scientists in both the social and educational sciences. Despite the powerful potential for cross-fostering of ideas between...

One of the most significant developments in contemporary education is the view that knowing and understanding are anchored in cultural practices within communities. This shift coincides with technological advancements that have reoriented end-user computer interaction from individual work to communication, participation and collaboration. However,...

The dramatic technological advancements that characterize our current networked society have shifted the ways that people communicate, educate, and interact with each other. How could we build on these advancements to enhance the democratic essence of learning processes for the benefit of both society as a whole and its individual members? What are...

Modern life requires individuals with little formal educational background in the sciences to daily make science and technology-based decisions, ranging from vaccinating one’s children and consuming genetically modified food to buying a house near a nuclear power plant. The main information source for many such decisions are contemporary media that...

Licence-fee funding in many public service broadcasting regimes is in turmoil and Israel is no exception. Since its inception in 1965, public broadcasting has been a continous presence and a central player in Israeli public life and culture, and the licence fee a common fixture. However, in 2014, the law that established the Israeli Broadcasting Au...

This chapter provides a longitudinal analysis of the digital divide in Israel between 2002-2013. It demonstrates how the gap has not been closing.

The digital divide policy conversation focuses on connectivity and access to information and communication technologies as well as on the ability to use them in pre-prescribed ways and on the utility that their usage provides according to preset categories.However, the dynamics offered by van Dijk (2005) demonstrate that categorical inequalities pe...

Interviews, site visits and observations are used in this study to describe the information needs of the asylum seeker and refugee community in Israel, utilizing Taylor's (1991) concept of identifying " information use environments " (IUE), whose elements are people, their settings, their problems, and the solutions they find for their problems. A...

Interviews, site visits and observations are used in this study to describe the information needs of the asylum seeker and refugee community in Israel, utilizing Taylor's (1991) concept of identifying " information use environments " (IUE), whose elements are people, their settings, their problems, and the solutions they find for their problems. A...

Communications policies are based on normative assumptions and establish the types and goals of communication processes secured. Policies regarding the Internet and the media that emerged as a result of the former’s growth as the predominant communications network developed along utilitarian principles. We believe, however, that new media’s unique...

Improving the condition of marginalized communities in society cannot happen without changing current information and communications policies. These policies should not focus on the contribution they make to the common good, which takes place at the expense of the needs and wants of subaltern individuals. Rather, they should aim at the fulfillment...

We describe three philosophies of justice: (a) the utilitarian, which says that decisions should be made with the aim of producing the greatest good for the greatest number; (b) John Rawls’s theory of justice, which contends that social and economic inequalities should be rearranged so that they provide the greatest advantage to the least advantage...

Israel serves as an illustrative testbed for the potential of contemporary media to rewrite the rules of social engagement and to create new participatory opportunities for marginalized communities. Indeed, as is common in most Western societies, Israeli society is experiencing a “digital divide,” and here we present some figures from a longitudina...

What differentiates contemporary media from their predecessors is not that they are social, as would seem to be the case owing to their common descriptor as “social media,” but that they create an opportunity for a new type of mediated sociability. They differ from the traditional media that dominated the twentieth century in four aspects: they pro...

The indigenous Israeli Bedouins are systematically marginalized. Within this population, the people of Al-‘Arakeeb, a small “unrecognized” village located near the main road to Beer Sheva, which was demolished in 2010 and has since been repeatedly rebuilt and demolished, are perhaps the most oppressed. The story of the people in Al-‘Arakeeb demonst...

iNakba is a trilingual—Arabic, Hebrew, and English—application based on global positioning system navigation technology. It was launched in 2014 by Zochrot (remembering in Hebrew), an Israeli nongovernmental organization, and it allows users to locate Palestinian villages that were destroyed during and after the 1948 war between Jewish forces and l...

All media are new when they appear on the horizon and old by the time another, newer, medium arises. Indeed, the depiction of a medium as new connotes that something in this medium is different that sets it apart from existing media. In this book we will elaborate on the unique features that define new media: their interactivity, their potential to...

In this book, a novel approach applying the theoretical framework of distributional justice theories developed by John Rawls and Amartya Sen to the governance of today’s media proposes a fresh, innovative assessment of the potential role for media in society. Three case studies describe the utilization of new media by marginalized communities in Is...

Media reform has not been high on the agenda of social reform movements in Israel historically, nor has it emerged as one following the social protests of 2011. All three reform strategies identified by Hackett and Carrol (2006)—internal, alternative media, and structural change—had been tried over the years. It emerges that the only strategy with...

This collection brings together strategies for advancing media reform objectives, prepared by 33 scholars and activists working in and/or studying in more than 25 countries, including: Canada, Mexico and the United States; Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Uruguay, and Venezuela; Iceland; Germany, Switzerland and the...

The Israeli Minister of Communications appointed on 4 February 2014 a tenmember expert committee to propose a regulatory framework for the future of commercial television (broadcast and cable) in light of the imminent introduction of over the top (OTT) audio-visual services. In this study, the authors describe the process influencing the committee’...

Media reform has not been high on the agenda of social reform movements in Israel historically, nor has it emerged as one following the social protests of 2011. All three reform strategies identified by Hackett and Carrol (2006)-internal, alternative media, and structural change-had been tried over the years. It emerges that the only strategy with...

If in the past, memory has been understood to be a biological phenomenon relating to the individual and his cognition, today it is clear that memory is a social construction effected by political and cultural processes. This study describes the laws used by the state of Israel in order to form its official memory. It describes how collective memory...

When hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets in the summer of 2011, protesting the high cost of living and demanding “social justice,” the ills of the media system including its concentration, the growing digital divide, and the implosion of public broadcasting were not made part of the social movement's agenda. This study employs a j...

Since its appearance in public life, the Internet has often been touted as more than a mere platform—instead, as an actual " game changer " —and its many applications are often referred to as " new media. " Different constituencies, however, perceive its " newness " differently and see its " game-changing " capabilities in different contexts. Some...

This volume not only examines traditional questions about broadband, such as availability and access, but also explores and evaluates new metrics that are more applicable to the evolving technologies of information access. It brings together a group of media policy scholars from a wide range of disciplines including economics, law, policy studies,...

This study presents a secondary analysis of real-time data of mobile phone usage in Israel during two recent wars – with the Lebanese Hezbollah in 2006 and with the Palestinian Hamas in Gaza in 2008/9. The data, provided by Cellcom Israel, the country’s largest mobile operator, enabled an analysis of real behavior patterns rather than relying on me...

One of the goals of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was to contribute to the erection of “ roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines,” that in the words of then newly elected President Barack Obama, “bind us together.” However, while the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), which was established by the...

As more economic, educational, and social interactions occur online, broadband capabilities have become increasingly important. In the U.S., as in many countries, policy initiatives have targeted the digital divide, and one of the most prominent responses has been the creation or maintenance of public computing centers (PCCs). Building on models of...

After broadband access, what next? What role do metrics play in understanding "information societies"? And, more importantly, in shaping their policies? Beyond counting people with broadband access, how can economic and social metrics inform broadband policies, help evaluate their outcomes, and create useful models for achieving national goals? Bro...

This article on the civic struggles of residents of the demolished Bedouin village of Al-’Arakeeb in Israel demonstrates how social media have helped marginalized communities acquire a voice. It is based on site visits to the village over the course of a year beginning in July 2010, and on interviews with residents, Bedouin and Jewish activists, an...

This study on the users of three public computer centers (PCCs) operating in a city in the Midwest region of the US attempts to further understand the localized value of broadband Internet access for members of low-income communities. These PCCs primarily serve low-income members of the African American community and offer free access to laptop com...

In this article the authors report the results of a year-long investigation into the state of the low-power FM (LPFM) industry on its 10th anniversary. They question whether LPFM stations give voice to the previously voiceless as envisioned or, as some research has indicated, benefit religious communities' efforts to expand their cultural reach. Us...

We examine how neoliberal and multicultural discourses were employed in the development of digital terrestrial television (DTT) policy in Israel as a case study of the deployment of media technology in a society that is characterized by deep social cleavages and rapid neoliberalization. We conduct a detailed analysis of official documents published...

An assessment of the extent of public involvement in the FCC's media ownership hearings in 2006–07 was conducted through an analysis of the hearings' structure, the 732 public comments made in them, and the FCC's ensuing Report & Order (R&O). In light of the rising call for pluralism, direct democracy and public involvement in policy deliberations,...

The European Union (EU) is a unique supranational entity that has adopted an innovative approach to the challenges posed by its distinctive structure, by the convergence of communications technologies, and by the introduction of free market economics. In the process of transforming into a powerful union that preserves the sovereignty of its members...

The determination whether mobile and fixed telecommunications services operate in the same market not only affects business decision of service providers, but also has wide implications on public policy decisions pertaining to the means by which they should be regulated in the United States. This study conducts a two-stage cluster analysis implemen...

A critical-historical description and analysis of the development of the laws regulating electioneering in broadcasting and their interpretation by policymakers and courts over a period of nearly fifty years in Israel demonstrates how the conceptual basis for the regulation scheme originally offered by the law as early as 1959 has been turned on it...

A framing analysis was performed on 22 local news reports identified in 90 newscasts carried by television stations covering the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) public hearings on media ownership held in Harrisburg, PA and Tampa, FL in 2007. It revealed two frames: one portraying the hearings as “unimportant” and another suggesting that “...