No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The National-Religious Community and the Media: A Love-Hate Relationship
Abstract
Interaction between a minority and the majority is usually multifaceted and can be examined from different angles. This article explores the approach of National-Religious Israelis towards the media, primarily television, radio, and printed press, as a means to understanding the relationship of that group to the larger society.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
With the solidifying of the Internet as an influential form of mediated communication has come a surge of activity among media scholars looking into what leads individuals to use this emerging technology. This study focuses on religiosity as a potential predictor of Internet activity, and uses a combination of secularization theory and uses and gratifications theory as a foundation from which to posit a negative relation between these 2 variables. Religiosity is found to retain a significant negative relation with Internet use at the zero order, and remains a robust negative predictor of the criterion variable even after accounting for a host of demographic, contextual, and situational variables. Ramifications for these findings are discussed and an outline for future research building on our analyses is provided.
It is argued that since its institutionalization in the 1970s, Uses and Gratifications research has been heavily influenced by applied economic theories about Expectancy Value and Subjective Expected Utility. Underlying these theories are assumptions about the acting individual having full mastery of situations. This idea is contrasted with the way in which action theory portrays action. Here, mastery of situations is not assumed at forehand, but depends on the situation and is something that has to be achieved. Action theories further emphasize the influence of others. Applying these ideas to the study of media use means that more attention has to be paid to processes of gaining mastery, to situational influences, and to the influence of others. It is argued that discrete-time event history analysis may be a valuable tool to accomplish this. This may contribute to the study of several important questions in communication research, regarding audience flow and audience selectivity, and the social uses of media use.
Psychological changes which result from culture contact and social change have been described for many years within a number of theoretical frameworks, among which is the theory of Marginal Man: Persons living in an acculturated Aboriginal (Australian) community were interviewed in an attempt to comprehend the relations among a number of scaled variables involved in this and other theoretical approaches. Measures taken, in addition to psychological marginality itself, were for alienation, social deviance, psychosomatic stress, attitudes to modes of relating to the dominant White society, degree of westernization, personal barriers to interacting with the dominant community, and ethnic identification. A pattern of results emerged which, in part, supported marginality theory, but which also pointed to a pattern involving more marginality, more deviance and more stress for those rejecting the dominant White society. An interpretation of the data, is offered in terms of reaffirmation of traditional values, a phenomenon anticipated by the original formulators of marginality theory, and now well-documented in the anthropological literature. This interpretation is supported by further analyses of the data in relation to indices of acculturation.
The growing popularity of synagogue pamphlets in Israel is a result of increased alienation of the religious community from mainstream secular institutions, and especially secular media. Synagogue pamphlets oppose secular and liberal hegemony by providing alternative interpretations of current events, solidifying group identity, defining the boundaries of the community, and boosting the religious community's self image. The implications of this phenomenon to the fabric of Israeli society are discussed.
The article examines the representation patterns of the Israeli geographic periphery in the national media over a period of four decades. Its main goal is to analyse the role that the national press plays in constructing the periphery as the 'other' in public consciousness. Our analysis demonstrates bow the press makes use of diverse strategies, all leading to the construction of peripheral locations as 'unimportant, 'marginal' or 'negligible', and all characterized by events, customs, culture, norms and behaviour patterns different from those characteristic of the 'centre'. We will show how the national press glorifies the Israeli 'centre', defines who is included within its boundaries and who is not, and delineates between it and the periphery.
