Does spontaneous contact between individuals from different ethnonational groups affect their social resilience, specifically their ability to avoid escalation and radicalization following eruptions of ethnic violence? To address this question, we conducted a series of studies in mixed Jewish–Palestinian cities and academic settings. Study 1, based on data collected through large-scale online surveys of residents in both mixed and non-mixed cities in Israel (n = 944), reveals that Jewish and Palestinian residents living in mixed cities exhibit higher social resilience than residents of homogeneous cities. This heightened resilience is manifested through more favorable attitudes toward the outgroup and reduced feelings of tension during and following episodes of intercommunal violence. We propose that the underlying mechanism explaining this resilience to the disruptive effects of violence is the higher prevalence of spontaneous intergroup contact enabled in mixed settings compared to more homogeneous ones. This explanation is supported by Study 2, which involved two rounds of surveys completed by Jewish and Palestinian students (n = 6467) at a heterogeneous campus in a mixed city in Israel. The findings demonstrate that positive attitudes toward the outgroup following incidents of intercommunal violence were more durable among students exposed to spontaneous intergroup contact. We discuss the implications of our findings for deepening our understanding of conflict and conflict management in ethnically mixed and conflicted settings.

This study focuses on a major sector in the Jewish–Israeli society that has a significant and growing influence on Israeli political and policy decisions: the ultra-Orthodox society. It investigates, within the context of the 2023–2025 Israel–Hamas war, factors explaining ultra-Orthodox Israeli–Jews support for a regional agreement that includes Israel, the Palestinians and Arab and Muslim states. Our analysis is based on a representative sample of ultra-Orthodox Israeli–Jews (N = 202) obtained through public opinion polling. In line with our expectation, empathy toward Palestinians and consumption of mainstream news each made a significant contribution to explaining ultra-Orthodox support for a regional agreement. In addition, as anticipated, hawkishness provided an added significant contribution to the overall explanatory power of the model. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Intermingling new and old media, this article introduces the concept of phonographic theatricality to explore the performativity of human-machine vocality. It jointly discusses the theatricality of historical and new sound media: media principles that characterized the phonograph in its emergence are still evident in the speech of contemporary AI-voice agents. Phonographic theatricality is a cross-media concept describing the conditions, playfulness, contingencies, and implications of the actualization of pre-recorded voices. It covers a broad range of cases in which a machine injects a human sounding voice into a situation, usually acousmatic in its detachment from a human body, yet performing as a theatrical agent. The analysis demonstrates how sound media theatricalize truthfulness, fidelity, illusion, and trickery as part of their mediation of voices, and how humans and machines mingle in producing phonographic theatricality. Three historical dramas, as well as contemporaneous newspaper articles, caricatures and ads, unveil the rise of phonographic theatricality as a media principle, inviting and affording a discussion on the performativity of AI voices. When machines speak and laugh in human voices, they become actors, vocally reshaping the space in which they operate, charging it with theatricality.

Using data from the 2012–2020 European Social Survey and Schwartz’s theory of basic values, this article maps the values of tech-workers, in order to assess and understand their uniqueness and homogeneity. Consistent with prior, mostly US-focused research, we find that European tech-workers hold a liberal worldview, which values openness to change, individualism, and universalism and devalues conservatism. However, our findings challenge the notion of tech-workers as being a completely distinct or a homogeneous group in terms of their values. While developers appear to be substantively different from other occupations and non-developers working in tech, non-developers hold values similar to those of other occupational elites, such as professionals and managers. The study offers takeaways for research, policy, and education.

This deprivation study leverages the smartphone’s absence to understand its presence, exploring a one-week smartphone deprivation experience of 80 Israeli adolescents aged 13-18. The data was primarily qualitative, derived from field journals, interviews, and focus groups. However, the most important and least expected finding was quantitative: all participants but one completed the week. This could be due to gratifications from nonuse that kicked-in. Analysis of the meaning of the abstention, and hence of the smartphone, focused on the cellular’s 3Ps: portable, personal, and prosthetic. The portability aspect showed that the device, with its user’s social world collapsed into it, stands as a meta-social entity, providing security and embeddedness. The personal aspect highlighted the significance of smartphone-enabled: (a) hyperconnectivity, (b) rituals, emphasizing its liminality and role as a Winnicottian transitional object, (c) existential significance of the user-smartphone amalgam. The prosthetic aspect pointed to the importance of the device’s physical and psychological “presence,” interpreted through the concepts of McLuhan’s “extension,” Aaron and Aaron’s “expansion,” and Schweiker’ “enhancement” of self. The relatively benign nature of the withdrawal experience suggests that re-balancing space and time orientations and an altered media-ecology equilibrium was experienced as gratifying.

It is commonly argued that factual knowledge about a political issue increases attitude polarization due to politically motivated reasoning. By this account, individuals ignore counter-attitudinal facts and direct their attention to pro-attitudinal facts; reject counter-attitudinal facts when directly confronted with them; and use pro-attitudinal facts to counterargue, all making them more polarized. The observation that more knowledgeable partisans are often more polarized is widely taken as support for this account. Yet these data are only correlational. Here, we directly test the causal effect of increasing issue-relevant knowledge on attitude polarization. Specifically, we randomize whether N = 1,011 participants receive a large, credible set of both pro- and counter-attitudinal facts on a contentious political issue – gun control – and provide a modest incentive for them to learn this information. We find evidence that people are willing to engage with and learn policy-relevant facts both for and against their initial attitudes; and that this increased factual knowledge shifts individuals towards more moderate policy attitudes, a durable effect that is still visible after one month. Our results suggest that the impact of directionally motivated reasoning on the processing of political information might be more limited than previously thought.

But There Was Love—Shaping the Memory of the Shoah proposes a new paradigm for Shoah remembrance in today’s cultural and political reality. It derives from the four-year workings of a group of researchers and artists at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute led by Michal Govrin. The group positions the extraordinary Jewish and non-Jewish human struggle in facing dehumanization and extermination as the essence of the Shoah, challenging us with a profound ethical call.

This article examines how Nazi-era film footage shaped Holocaust memory in post-war German film documentaries. From the mid-1950s, filmmakers began using previously unreleased archival footage to document the persecution of European Jews, a subject that had been largely suppressed until then. These films often relied on unpublished records from propaganda units, soldiers and Nazi officials. As a result, they contain ‘contagious images’ that either had served as propaganda or concealed violence, and often reflected the perpetrators’ detached and cold perspective. Despite these challenges, directors repurposed this footage to expose Nazi crimes and emphasize Jewish suffering, shifting focus away from the perpetrators’ perspective. By analyzing films such as Den BlodigaTiden/Mein Kampf (Bloody Times/My Struggle, 1960, Erwin Leiser) and Auf den Spuren des Henkers (On the Trail of the Hangman, 1961, Peter Schier-Gribowsky), this article explores strategies used to reframe these ‘contagious images’ and analyses how they contributed to a collective memory of the Holocaust. These documentaries countered post-war silence, allowing audiences to engage with repressed histories and fostering a collective reckoning. The use of archival footage not only established and shaped a visual language that underscored the atrocities but also emphasised the importance of memory preservation.

This essay aims, first, to expose the failure of post-Holocaust cinema, as well as Western trauma and genocide research on the Age of Testimony, to take into consideration non-Western survivors' accounts of twentieth century's collective traumas. Second, and consequently, it aims to analyze Chinese independent director Wang Bing's 2007-2018 (mostly documentary) hexaptych - He Fengming (2007), Brutality Factory (2007), The Ditch (2010), Dead Souls (2017), Traces (2009), and Beauty Lives in Freedom (2018) - on the still taboo issue of the re-education-death-camp Jiabiangou and the Maoist chaos. Wang represents the subject positions of victims, collaborators, followers, cadres, and dissidents as well as the extraordinary form of un-witnessing (my term) Jiabiangou. The hexaptych constitutes a major epistemological-cinematic breakthrough by depicting the inevitable negation of all forms of working-through, while simultaneously proposing unique cinematic memorialization-based mourning rituals. Hence, it paves the way to re-theorizing the ethics entailed in current trauma cinema studies.

An investigation of the connections between the parallel rise of modern Hebrew and modern media After lying dormant for two millennia as a mainly written language, Hebrew awoke from its literary slumber to become a living modern vernacular. This revitalization is unique and unprecedented in world history, and its success has been studied in fields from linguistics to cultural history. However, the role of modern technologies in mediating this revival has not yet been considered.What happens when an ancient language meets modern technology? Lingua Ex Machina explores such a moment in its investigation of the role media technologies—including typewriters, phonographs, and computers—played in the revitalization and modernization of Hebrew from the end of the nineteenth century into the present day.Ido Ramati examines the role sound recording technologies played in shaping the reemergence of modern Hebrew speech, reveals how the Hebraized typewriter pushed for the modernization of writing in Hebrew, and ultimately argues that these media—whose development and adoption paralleled the revitalization of Hebrew—were an active force in shaping the language as a modern communicative medium. This case study of Hebrew furnishes researchers with a rare opportunity to investigate the complex relation between language, its speakers, and technology at a decisive moment, and sheds new light on the study of media technologies and their theoretical, lingual, and social implications.

The way digital news platforms represent migration issues can significantly impact intergroup relations and policymaking. A recurring question in the debate on the role of news platforms is whether they merely transmit information on migration, or actively hype specific issues. Drawing on a comprehensive set of socioeconomic statistics on migrants in Denmark, and employing a longitudinal automated content analysis of migration news content, we utilize time-series analysis to understand how four distinct categories of threat (security, economic, cultural, and generalized) relate to socioeconomic data on terror attacks, migrant crime levels, economic performance, and demographic trends. The results reveal a direct effect of terror attacks, economic performance, and demographic trends on migration news. We discuss the implications of socioeconomic and demographic developments as factors in digital media content to understand the role of media and substantiate contemporary debates.

The study delves into the image migration of liberation films shot by Soviet camera teams in the concentration camps Auschwitz and Majdanek. Scattered and incomplete, these films pose challenges for scholars seeking origin, context, and migration paths. For this exploration, the EU Horizon 2020 project ‘Visual History of the Holocaust’ (VHH) marked a watershed moment. Through digitization and computer aided film analysis, VHH compiled and categorized Allied liberation films, including footage previously unknown to the public. This facilitated a nuanced understanding of how footage migrated in various versions and hence will help to explore its historical significance. The project linked the original liberation footage with its use in early documentaries, revealing how compilation films functioned as carriers for dispersed archives worldwide. In case of the Soviet liberation materials, much of the iconic footage only survived in early compilations like OSWIECIM and MAJDANEK. However, comparisons between newly acquired and known footage allows reconstructing the missing archival records to a certain extent. Geopolitical challenges limited access to certain film versions, emphasizing the importance of external research for completing the archival records. Despite these obstacles, the VHH project showcases how technology and comprehensive analyses transform the study of historical film footage, unveiling layers of untapped cinematic memory.

Campaign promises are a central mechanism for voters to hold politicians accountable, and information about their breakage or fulfillment features prominently in the media during election campaigns. Despite the importance of campaign promises, previous research yields conflicting expectations regarding their influence on citizens. Some theories suggest citizens vote based on policy performance and, therefore, consistently penalize actors who break their promises. Other theoretical accounts, however, argue that exposure to information during election campaigns often has minimal effects on citizens due to strongly held prior beliefs and partisan motivations. The goal of the current study is to address these competing claims by systematically testing the conditions under which citizens penalize politicians for breaking promises. We conducted four experiments (total N = 7,030), three of them preregistered, in two countries under varying political conditions. We find that (1) broken promises decrease domain-specific evaluations of leaders but have little impact on evaluations of actors’ overall performance; (2) broken promises have limited effects when people have strong priors about the political actor who made the promise; and (3) citizens downplay and rationalize promises broken by ingroup, but not outgroup, leaders. These results suggest that even though information about broken promises is salient in campaign communications, its impact on citizens is context-dependent and often quite limited.

The ways in which privacy is understood, defined, perceived, and enacted are contingent on cultural, social, political, economic, and technological settings. Yet, privacy research is often criticized for not adequately accounting for these. A comparative perspective requires the contextualization of privacy through investigating similarities and differences across contexts. This article outlines the Comparative Privacy Research Framework, which involves (a) scrutinizing one’s position (of power) and epistemological biases, (b) assessing the comparability of the object under study, (c) identifying and justifying meaningful units of comparison, and (d) reflecting on how these units of comparison interact in shaping privacy. We conclude by proposing a comparative privacy research agenda that informs efforts in privacy regulation, education, and research.

Privacy research struggles with modelling how individuals value and enact privacy, and faces challenges in explaining apparent contradictions such as the privacy paradox and manifestations of privacy-related disempowerment. Such uncertainties arise from the use of unidimensional privacy constructs or through assumptions that privacy-related decisions are rational or intentional. Addressing these lacunae, we present and empirically test the Dimensionalised Privacy Behaviour (DPB) model, which simultaneously examines the relationships between privacy concerns and privacy-protecting behaviours (PPB) along privacy’s horizontal and vertical orientations, and introduces online privacy literacy and privacy self-efficacy as additional explanatory mechanisms in PPB modelling. Using data from a representative sample of 618 US social media users, we demonstrate that the privacy concerns/privacy behaviours dynamic is better understood along its vertically – and horizontally-oriented dimensions, and that each dimension interacts differently with explanatory elements. Furthermore, while affirming the established logic between privacy concerns and PPB, these results highlight privacy self-efficacy as a significant factor for explaining PPB, with differing effects in each dimension.

Age 18 holds a special status as the symbolic marker between “childhood” and “adulthood” in many cultures, often coinciding with voting age. While studies of political participation frequently prioritize voting as the primary civic act (for this critique see, e.g., Torney-Purta, Citation2005), scholars have long argued that we should consider children and youth not only as “citizens-in-the-making,” whom we are preparing for the future, but also “citizens now,” who have issues they care about, and who want to — and can — have social impact (Livingstone, Citation2009/2013). Supporting young people as they enact their citizenship, before and after “coming of age” legally, is more important now than ever, with democracy in global turmoil.

Social media is a central arena for the articulation of values, shaping what people around the world deem important and desirable. However, traditional value typologies struggle to capture the dynamic nature of value expression in digital spheres and overlook new communication-related values prevalent in these environments. Addressing these gaps, we developed an analytical framework for investigating value expression on social media, comprising three general value orientations (Do well, Do good, and Feel good) and four communicative value orientations (Inform, Influence, Bond, and Express). We drew on extensive cross-national research to construct the framework and examined its utility through a study of TikTok videos related to the FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Our analysis shows how value orientations enable the identification of patterns that underpin complex discourses. Ultimately, our framework offers a pathway to understand what people present as valuable on social media, as well as the broader value ecosystem platforms cultivate.

Beauty is one of the most popular and lucrative segments on YouTube, with broad transnational appeal, making it an ideal site to investigate the relationship between commercialization, globalization, and digital platforms. We focus on makeup reviews to utilize established research on cross-cultural differences in reviewing and ask how cultural repertoires of evaluation compare across multiple languages. We collected popular makeup reviews using keyword searches in five languages—English, German, Italian, Japanese, and Korean—associated with diverse cultural contexts. The top 20 videos in each language (n=100) were selected for analysis, producing a group of successful channels. We employed content analysis to compare the videos’ evaluative criteria, using a codebook of ten values. We found that creators across languages employ a shared cultural repertoire to evaluate beauty products, concerned with aesthetics, functionality, pleasure, and, to a lesser extent, distinctiveness and economy. While beauty creators appeal to a consistent set of values, they rarely elaborate on their meaning, focus on positivity, and emphasize the subjectivity of their evaluations. We argue that the approach to evaluation in YouTube makeup reviews challenges previously observed dichotomies between Eastern and Western countries, blending elements of both collectivist and individualist communication styles. Most creators make indirect recommendations even as they use reviews to build a distinctive personal brand. Although further research is necessary to investigate the reach of this practice, our analysis of multi-lingual makeup reviews demonstrates how the homogenization of social media entertainment need not be synonymous with Westernization.

In recent years, visual journalism has embraced a new form of storytelling alongside photographs and videos: the photographic GIF (graphics interchange format). Despite its association with humor on social media, the GIF has unexpectedly become a legitimate tool for documenting disasters and tragedies in online news. This challenges the traditional solemn tone of journalism, as the GIF's short, repetitive, and silent nature is reminiscent of humorous content rather than serious news representation. Photojournalism traditionally utilizes still images and videos for narrative storytelling, each having distinct characteristics and narrative possibilities. In contrast, the photographic GIF emerges as a hybrid format, combining photography and film elements. Its unique attribute of the looped movement stands in overt contrast with conventional news formats but reflects the transformations in visual news production following the widespread use of smartphones and social media. These changes shifted news consumption habits and have caused news organizations to adopt new designs and forms for online news outlets. This research focuses on the photographic GIF as a new visual form in online news, particularly in representing tragic events. It uses semiotic visual analysis and interviews with senior online news editors to explore the uses, meanings, and editorial considerations behind GIF production in newsrooms. The findings reveal the GIF's expansion beyond its initial contexts, demonstrating its legitimacy in the journalistic sphere and uncovering its means of conveying informative and traumatic content. The research underscores how the digital journalism industry adapts to the contemporary environment by integrating GIFs into storytelling practices.

Conspiracy theories have been studied increasingly in recent years, with the main research approach to understanding conspiracy theorists focusing on their personal characteristics. However, research has not yet clarified the role of online communities in the identity and social experience of believers. To address this, this research endeavor examines the social and community dynamics among conspiracy theory believers, focusing on the case study of the public Facebook group "The Flat Earth Community – Israel." Through a qualitative content analysis of posts and comments from within the group, the study reveals the role of a sense of community in the experiences of group participants. Findings reveal that participants seek appreciation and solidarity within the group while engaging in boundary work to maintain the authenticity of group members and defend the group against 'threats from the outside.' This research offers a deeper understanding of how online communities, serving as safe spaces for individuals whose beliefs are marginalized by societal norms, can fulfill a similar function for conspiracy theory believers. Such an in-depth understanding can help researchers to contend with the negative aspects of belief in conspiracy theories, for example through the consideration of alternative mechanisms that could satisfy participants’ need for a sense of community.