The social distancing and lockdown measures enacted to address the COVID-19 pandemic entailed an unprecedented shift to digitally-mediated communication. The move to remote learning at schools was one of such important changes. Drawing on privacy and STS literature, we investigate the role of different privacy cultures during the initial moment of turbulence, when schools had to quickly adapt to remote teaching. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with teachers in Israel and Germany. Our interviews carved out three distinct phases: A moment of turbulence, a period of negotiation and a phase of temporary closure, leading to the dominance of Zoom and Google Classroom in Israel, and government-mandated open-source tools for German teachers. These different pathways are shaped by considerations of vertical privacy among German teachers, and the absence of such considerations on the part of Israeli teachers.

This article revisits claims made a decade ago about the importance of the word “sharing” in the context of social network sites (SNSs). Based on an analysis of the home pages of 61 SNSs between the years 2011 and 2020, the findings incontrovertibly show that “sharing” has lost its central place in the terminology employed by social media platforms in their self-presentation. Where in the mid-2000s SNSs relied heavily on a rhetoric of sharing to promote their services, by 2020, this rhetoric had been almost entirely dropped. The research reported here implies that social media platforms no longer feel a need or desire to be associated with these cultural beliefs. Given this, questions are raised as to whether “sharing” remains a keyword for social media.

The COVID-19 crisis is a potential watershed moment for privacy with profound long-term effects on the organization and practices of work, education, and civic engagement. In this study we focus on the profound re-negotiation of mediated personal boundaries in times of mass lockdowns and social distancing. To understand how these new social conditions might be playing out in the field of privacy, we interviewed 90 faculty in higher education in Estonia, France and Israel. Participants were asked about changes in their ICT use for personal and work purposes, with the practice of distance teaching serving as a common experience for the discussion of possible changes in their views and practices of privacy. Our findings point to the precedence of $2 considerations of privacy over $2 considerations. In other words, interviewees had very little to say about the broader forms of data collection by their employers, the state, or commercial companies that are enabled by the adoption of new ICTs. They did, though, have much to say about their mediated relations with students and colleagues, and were very much concerned with self-presentation and impression management as well as with sustaining meaningful teaching situations. In general, the prism of privacy unearths the hidden social structures of teaching and interacting online.

The typical Cart Narcs YouTube video opens with “Agent Sebastian” walking through a grocery store parking lot. Sebastian briefly explains the video's purpose - "We shame people who don't put their carts back" - as he looks for a cart miscreant to confront. When he spots a target, he runs towards them making siren noises, outfitted in a Cart Narcs t-shirt and a police-style utility vest. "Cart Narcs!" he shouts. "That's not where the cart goes!" From here, the videos take one of two routes. In a minority of cases, the target returns the cart. In most cases, though, the interaction escalates and the target ends up yelling and swearing at Sebastian, who calmly insists that he is just promoting considerate behavior.

This study investigates the central dilemmas and changes in social media use among people whose religious identity is in flux, with an emphasis on backstage processes of decision making. Drawing on 15 in-depth interviews with Muslim women in Israel, we found five main themes reflecting the main online changes users experience and effect. We suggest two different logics that the themes show in online decision-making regarding identity and self-presentation. The first is relatively predictable, whereby users reconstruct their social environment to fit their new religious identity. The second logic concerns the management of ties and content in accordance with religious obligations in ways that may not fit the user’s personal welfare, and which are related to complex inner conflicts of the user. While previous literature stresses personal welfare as a main factor behind online tie and content management, in this article we show how users are willing to sacrifice their online welfare for the sake of their new identity.

This article explores the Facebook unfriending of users from a majority group by members of a minority group, focusing on Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. Indeed, this is the first study to focus on power differentials among Facebook users in the context of unfriending. The article thus adds depth to our understanding of unfriending, while also shedding light on the experience of social media use from the perspective of an oppressed minority. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty ’48 Palestinians (Palestinian citizens of Israel), we present various triggers for unfriending (mainly, encounters with racism and surveillance), and show that Palestinians’ stories of unfriending Jewish Israelis are sometimes about punching up and sometimes about stepping away. However, while unfriending is broadly considered an apt response to abuse, it also distances Palestinians from centers of power in Israel. This suggests an important way in which social media reproduce inequality.

This study investigates the interface between increased religiousity among Muslim Arab women in Israel, and their social media use. To understand their use of social media as part of a profound change in social identity, fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with Muslim women aged 19-26 who are, or have been, social media users, who live in Israel, and who have become significantly more religious than they had previously been. The findings show two different logics of social media use in times of religious identity change. The first includes reconstructing social media ties to be an alternative, supportive environment, while the second relates to decision making based on the religious rules newly adopted by respondents. Two main social practices were related to the second kind of social media use: managing (and often removing) ties with male users, which raised profound personal dilemmas, and removing digital traces by deleting past posts and photos. Such decisions were made to obey religious rules rather than to gratify personal needs. Social media accompany and assist in the identity change, starting from its very beginnings, and throughout the process. While previous research shows that SNS tie management is an essential part of our identity, our findings show the religious identity of women to be a distinct case where religious rules guide behaviour and decision making. The very fact that these acts and dilemmas are visible to us is a result of paying special attention to identities in flux.

In this article we present an analysis of the concepts of fenxiang and gongxiang – the Mandarin words for ‘sharing’– in the context of Chinese social media. We do so through an interrogation of the words fenxiang and gongxiang as used by Chinese social media companies. Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we created screenshots of 32 Chinese social network sites between 2000 and 2018 and tracked changes in the usage of fenxiang and gongxiang over time. The Mandarin translations in some ways operate like the English word, ‘sharing’. Fenxiang has the meaning of participating in social media, and gongxiang refers to technological aspects of sharing, while also conveying a sense of harmony. However, the interpersonal relations implied by fenxiang, and the political order implied by gongxiang, are quite different from those conveyed by ‘sharing’. Together, fenxiang and gongxiang construct a convergence of micro-level interpersonal harmony and macro-level social harmony. Thus, the language of sharing becomes the lens through which to observe the subtlety, complexity and idiosyncrasies of the Chinese internet. This article offers a new heuristic for understanding Chinese social media, while also pointing to an important facet of the discursive construction of Chinese social media. This implies a continuing need to de-westernize research into the internet and to identify cultural-specific meanings of social media.

This article looks closely at the notion of sharing as it is used in the context of the sharing economy. It is based on the qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted in four countries with thirty-four participants who see themselves as operating within the sharing economy. Interviewees' definitions and understandings of sharing are presented, with particular focus on the question of whether the presence of money is a counterindication for sharing. While some interviewees unequivocally reject as sharing any transaction that involves money, and while some view the use of 'sharing' to describe such interactions as manipulative and deceptive, others see the two as potentially co-existing. One mechanism that enables this is seeing paying and sharing as referring to different aspects of the same transaction. Interestingly, it is not only representatives of for-profit companies who argue that even where there is money, there can also be sharing, but also social justice activists lobbying for their vision of a sharing economy. Adopting a pragmatic approach to language, but not forgoing critique, the article argues for a close analysis of how people actually talk about sharing rather than dismissing certain practices as 'not really sharing'.

In the context of the internet, the concept of ‘sharing’ is a central and powerful metaphor (John, 2013, 2016; Kennedy, 2016). It reflects and constructs the ideal type of relations between users—relations based on honesty, mutuality and openness. However, the semantic spheres of meaning that give ‘sharing’ its contemporary force are profoundly Western and rooted in the English language. The concept of ‘sharing’ as used in Western social network sites (SNSs) ‘works’ because it appeals to a sense of equality, because it refers to the digital transfer of information, and because it is a cultural type of talk (Carbaugh, 1989) through which we know ourselves and others; in other words, it appeals to a certain self and makes assumptions about how that self knows itself and maintains ties with others. This self has been defined as a ‘therapeutic self’ (Füredi, 2004). Yet this does not necessarily apply outside Western cultures, raising the possibility that work on ‘sharing’ to date is Western centric and should be dewesternized (see esp. Park & Curran, 2000; Waisbord & Mellado, 2014). Indeed, as argued in cross-cultural pragmatics (Wierzbicka, 2003), language encodes cultural differences; thus, even though American and Chinese social media users appear to be doing more or less the same things online—posting content, writing messages, uploading videos, etc.—the fact that their participation has different names—sharing in the US, and fenxiang in China—implies that it may also have different meanings.