Yaron Ariel

Max Stern Academic College of Emek Yezreel | YVC · Department of Communication

Cyberspace has introduced new and intriguing means for knowledge shar- ing as well as new structures of mediated knowledge-building communities. Considering the various forms of online communities, it should be difficult to overstate the significance of Wikipedia as a landmark in building communal knowledge repositories. Wikipedia is an online coll...

Inspired by the uses and gratifications theory, this study examines the role of closed women’s Facebook groups in mediating the relationship between various forms of loneliness and perceived gratification among Israeli women. We surveyed 521 female participants to explore the mediating effect of engagement on loneliness and perceived gratification....

This study, conducted in Germany and Israel in May 2021, compares German and Israeli news media consumption concerning the Russian–Ukrainian war using a structured online questionnaire. A total of 1,310 and 509 valid questionnaires were completed in Germany and Israel, respectively, examining differences in how news consumers used media to access i...

This study examined Israeli news professionals’ adoption and usage of Twitter as a journalistic tool. A mixed-methods approach was used, including a survey and open-ended questions, to gather data from 63 news staff members, including senior news presenters, correspondents and commentators. The results showed that Israeli news staff primarily use T...

Second-screen use has attracted significant scholarly attention over the last decade. Although media usage is important during crises, no study has examined second screening in times of violent conflict, when civilians are directly affected. This study examines the role of second-screen usage in Israeli citizens' lives during the May 2021 Israel-Pa...

The current research focuses on two closed Facebook groups founded and operated by women, and targets an exclusively female audience with over 100, 000 members in each. By analysing 433 posts from one group (study 1), and 1, 070 from another (study 2), this paper identified the relationships between levels of self-disclosure expressed in members' p...

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated severe social, economic, and political implications and challenges in addition to unprecedented health threats and harm. A typical phenomenon associated with emergencies and crises is the spreading of rumours. Social networks have become a popular arena for spreading rumours in various contexts, including during...

COVID-19 ushered in almost unprecedented socioeconomic and political challenges. A typical social reaction during such emergencies is rumormongering, which has intensified since the advent of social media. This study explored factors affecting users’ willingness to spread pandemic-related rumors in Wuhan, China and Israel. We tested a multi-variant...

This study investigates the effects of the two leading prime ministerial candidates’ personal Facebook and Twitter accounts and the effects of exposure to the general social media and web discourse in Hebrew on voters’ agendas during Israel’s April 2019 election. All the posts that appeared on the contenders’ accounts at a point in time in each of...

Twenty-five years after the first emergence of the Internet in its World Wide Web format, the nexus between the digital sphere and the political communication sphere is no longer disputed. This paper examines the vibrant changes of the relationships between the digital sphere and political communication from the mid-1990s till today. We highlight f...

The World Cup is among the most popular televised sport events. This case study examined how enjoyment from and transportation into World Cup broadcasts affected WhatsApp use on a second screen. The authors hypothesized a negative correlation between World Cup enjoyment and WhatsApp use (both match related and unrelated), mediated by transportation...

Usage patterns of mobile phones in Israel position them as instruments of great importance and as everyday, multipurpose, and interpersonal devices. This study utilizes a critical perspective of the “uses and gratifications” approach to explore the usage of and gratification sought from smartphone usage of millennials. Sixty personal in-depth inter...

Online social networks have become a central platform for fostering interpersonal relationships among young people. This article seeks to scrutinize whether social relationships on online social networks foster meaningful social connections: Do they relieve feelings of loneliness for those who are otherwise alone, or do they create imaginary connec...

This study examined the viewpoints of lecturers and students regarding the roles of smartphones in the classroom: how legitimate is it to use them in class, and in what ways? Does the usage of smartphones impair in-class learning processes, and if it does, can we tie specific uses with specific disruptions to the class? Conversely, could it be that...

In recent years, changes have taken place in television viewing patterns during live broadcasts of major events. One of the most striking changes is the introduction of “second screens” that accompany viewing. The current study adds to the existing research literature by examining viewing patterns and socialization during the live broadcast of majo...

Agenda-setting research has been performed for more than four decades, both in traditional and online media, and the tools employed for this task have been very much accepted by media researchers around the world. Nevertheless, analysis of the public agenda in new media, particularly across social networks, requires re-thinking these same tools, wh...

The aim of this article is to map smartphone usage among young Israeli adults. Data were gathered using a combined methodological approach, comprising a representative survey of 550 young Israeli adults (21–31 years old), followed by interviews with 60 undergraduate students. Five functions of gratification clusters were analysed. The highest grati...

The study of online privacy addresses three separated domains: user privacy concerns and behavior, website privacy notices and practices, and state privacy policies and regulations. This study suggests an analytical framework which combines these domains. While most of the framework's variables are addressed in current literature, one is missing: v...

The emergence of new media, primarily social networks, raises questions about the interactions at play between 'new' and 'old' media in terms of the media and the public agendas. This topic is particularly relevant during elections. By analysing news from three Israeli television channels and using an online monitoring system to analyse user discou...

This study looks at the roles that WhatsApp, the popular smartphone application, played in the lives of Israeli citizens, who were exposed to war menaces during July 2014. During the war, WhatsApp became the subject of public, media, and political discourse, especially within the context of disseminating information related to combat – ‘authentic’...

The aim of this paper is to provide a conceptual theoretical framework to the term “social” in a social media context. This is done by exploring the relationship between three central terms in a social media environment: information, interactivity, and sociability. We suggest a model that describes the relations between these terms in a social medi...

Interactivity is not unique to computers or networks and cannot be reserved solely for the discussion of so-called 'New Media'. Restricting analysis of interactivity to the domain of computerized and new technology alone problematizes comparisons with traditional media as well as with further developments of the new media. This article begins by re...

A virtual knowledge-building community is a group of people who collaboratively produce knowledge through an online-mediated environment. The process and means for sharing and producing knowledge in such a community can be described as a place where “knowledge creation is built into the social fabric and into the technologies that support knowledge...

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been one of the prominent phenomena in the emergent of online user-generated content. This study explores Wikipedians' (Wikipedia users) perceptions of Wikipedia knowledge, their sense of community and motivations for participating in Wikipedia. We suggest utilizing the constructivist approach to knowledge, as...