Elad Segev
Biographic Data
| ID | 3620491 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elad Segev |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elad |
| FAMILY NAME | Segev |
| SIGNATURE | SEGEV E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tel Aviv University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3969-8253 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 179 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Enhancing students’ critical thinking literacy in a generative AI context
This study examined, using eye-tracking technology, the gaze patterns of guided exposure to deepfake and authentic portrait images in comparison to unguided exposure to assess their influence on the acquisition and application of critical thinking literacy among first-year Bachelor students. Employing a between-groups experimental design, we analyzed visual gaze patterns between students who participated in the experiment group (n = 24) and those…
Managing Communication Uncertainties Between Mothers and Daughters Across Generational Cohorts
Mother-daughter relationships are characterized by tension between autonomy and connection, generating uncertainties in routine communication. Drawing on the Uncertainty Management Theory, this study explored relational uncertainties in adult mother-daughter communication across life stages within a familistic culture. We conducted six focus groups with 43 Israeli women across three generations: young adult (ages 23–35), midlife (ages 45–62), and…
How to do things with a keyword
While people regularly employ the term values in mundane interactions and political debates on social media, little is known about its function in public communication. Approaching values as a keyword in everyday communication, we asked: In what contexts do Twitter users invoke the term values? What discursive functions does the term serve? How do these contexts and functions differ across languages? To address these questions, we analyzed approx…
Communicating Science in the Age of GenAI
Effective science communication (SciComm) is crucial, but training scalability remains challenging. We explored whether generative AI (GenAI) could provide feedback to enhance SciComm strategies. In an online iterative distillation exercise, SciComm trainees ( N = 78) condensed their research. An experimental group ( n = 41) received jargon-oriented and GenAI feedback; controls ( n = 37) received only jargon feedback. Participants preferred revis…
Online Eudaemonic Spaces for Students During Covid-19
In this study, we analyzed students’ confessions during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, comparing Facebook Confession Boards (FCBs) from universities in 4 countries. Themes were interpreted through the framework of eudaemonic media entertainment (EME). Using semantic network analysis, we map the central themes in students’ confessions and use qualitative content analysis to explore them further through eudaemonic lenses. Our findings rev…
What ChatGPT “Thinks” About Your Country? Sentiments and Frames of AI Geographies
What opinions are generated by AI algorithms about different countries? Is there a systematic difference in the opinions generated about each region? In this paper we developed a machine learning model to classify labeled and unlabeled datasets of opinions about countries generated by ChatGPT. We used semantic network analysis to map the positive and negative opinions associated with each country. We found that ChatGPT tends to produce positive o…
Power and Relatedness in the Construction of Images and Emotions Toward Foreign Countries
In this study, we systematically explore the relationships between the emotions that people have toward foreign countries and their attributes. We conducted surveys in two different countries–Japan and Israel, yet our findings reveal similar patterns. In both Japan and Israel, we found that the perceived power and relationship with foreign countries as well as their attributes can evoke certain types of emotions. The economic and political perfor…
Fake News Makes the News
This paper explores how news media define and frame fake news, thus orienting public perceptions of fake news in terms of problem, causality, responsibilities, and solutions. It first maps the news discourse on fake news through semantic network analysis of 1,646 articles published in 2017–2018 (when the term reached its peak) and 2021–2022. It then analyzes the definitions and frames of fake news in a sample of 122 articles representative of the…
How to Do Things With “Values”
The term _values_ is prominent in political discourse. Yet its ubiquity is matched by its vagueness, especially when considering usage among different cultures. Twitter provides a promising venue for exploring the contested political discourse surrounding this term. In this paper, we study the use of the term values on Twitter across different language communities. We ask: _what meanings do users ascribe to the term “values”?_ and _what are the s…
Follow to be followed
This article outlines three major features of the digital society (information sharing, a levelled‐playing field, and reciprocal surveillance) and explores their manifestation in the field of diplomacy. The article analyzed the international network of 78 Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs) on Twitter during the critical period of its growth between 2014 and 2016. To explain why some MFAs follow or are followed by their peers, both internal (Twi…
The value(s) of social media rituals
2000), we compare discursive topics, modes of ritual participation, and the values expressed in resolutions. Our findings indicate both that the ritual crosses cultures and that there are language-specific dynamics that do not map neatly onto established divisions between 'Eastern' and 'Western' value orientations. Instead, we identify three underlying tensions organizing the articulation of values: self-acceptance vs. self-improvement, public vs…
Sharing Feelings and User Engagement on Twitter
This study explores how the expression of feelings and the use of personal pronouns on Twitter are associated with user engagement. Unlike most previous studies which focused on the types of emotions that generate user engagement, it uses the volume-control model, which also considers the social dimension of power. Looking at the usage of pronouns, it examines the balance achieved between popular messages that target larger groups and personalize…
Discursive diversion
We study how leaders of parliamentary democracies attempt to trigger the “rally-around-the-flag” effect through the mass media. We have collected news articles on North Korea and Iran published by liberal and conservative newspapers in Japan and Israel from 2009 to 2018 and analysed them in terms of their emphasis on threats, employing semi-supervised quantitative text analysis techniques. We find that both Japanese and Israeli conservative newsp…
Intergenerational Communication
Based on the Relational Dialectics Theory 2.0 and the concept of affordances, this study examined the competing discourses that animate the meaning of intergenerational communication among Israeli women. Three generations of women from nine families were interviewed about their perceptions and use of multiple channels–face-to-face communication, mobile phone calls, and WhatsApp chats–to communicate with each other. A contrapuntal analysis reveale…
Could leaders deflect from political scandals? Cross-national experiments on diversionary action in Israel and Japan
The diversionary theory of war is one of the best-known conflict initiation theories focusing on democratic leaders’ incentives to divert public attention away from political scandals or economic policy failures. While this assumption is well-known, few studies have examined if and how the use of force could divert public attention from such a scandal or failure. By using cross-national experiments in Japan and Israel, we provide empirical tests …
What you google is where you are from
What information do people search about other countries and why? In this study we coded and analyzed more than 15,000 Google searches related to France and Spain during a 16-year period, from 18 countries with diverse characteristics and relationships with France and Spain. We coded these search queries into topical categories. We also collected country-level variables to reflect the power of each country and its proximity to France and Spain. We…
Semantic Network Analysis in Social Sciences
Social Media Mobility
Recent years have seen mass adoption of social media by ministries of foreign affairs (MFAs). However, diplomats are still searching for ways to evaluate their online activity and assess the impact of online activities on offline diplomacy. This article argues that the centrality of a diplomatic institution to a Twitter network of its peer can be used to evaluate both online and offline diplomacy. Central actors on Twitter can set diplomats’ offl…
Teaching & Learning Guide for
Textual network analysis
The growing volumes of information available today provide opportunities but also challenges for social scientists. This paper presents textual network analysis—a network analysis procedure that transforms any given text into a visual map of words co‐occurring together. It aims at scholars and students who are not familiar with network analysis, showing step‐by‐step how to use this approach and highlighting its advantages and applications. It dem…
Volume and control
How does information become power, who gains and who loses, and what are the implications of this process? As much of the information we produce today is available to very few global companies and governments it is crucial to develop new concepts and modify the existing theories on information and power. Drawing on the political economy of communication, sociology and information science literature, this paper introduces an analytical framework t…
Global and local “teachable moments”
This study examined to what extent Nobel Prize announcements and awards trigger global and local searches or “teachable moments” related to the laureates and their discoveries. We examined the longitudinal trends in Google searches for the names and discoveries of Nobel laureates from 2012 to 2017. The findings show that Nobel Prize events clearly trigger more searches for laureates, but also for their respective discoveries. We suggest that fasc…
Temporal patterns of scientific information-seeking on Google and Wikipedia
In response to the news coverage of scientific events and to science education, people increasingly go online to get more information. This study investigates how patterns of science and technology information-seeking on Google and Wikipedia change over time, in ways that differ between “ad hoc” terms that correspond to news coverage and “cyclic” terms that correspond to the academic period. Findings show that the science and technology activity …
I never thought I could get health information from the Internet!”
The Internet is a major source for health information but contributes to the digital divide and health disparities. Minorities with low literacy skills are at a particular disadvantage in obtaining online information. A website was created with health information presented through videos in Amharic and an interface that does not require reading skills to enable users with low/no literacy to navigate among topics. In all, 225 Israeli Ethiopian imm…
Is Israel’s low rank on international achievement tests really surprising
Israel’s consistently low ranking on international achievement tests has been exclusively attributed to insufficient investments in education or inefficient use of available resources. In contrast, this article shows this low ranking to be a true reflection of Israel’s reality in terms of characteristics that affect the mean ability of its student population to profit from schooling (MAPS). Israel’s actual ranking on the PISA test among the 34 OE…
Social Media and the Arab Spring
The goal of this article is to place the role that social media plays in collective action within a more general theoretical structure, using the events of the Arab Spring as a case study. The article presents two broad theoretical principles. The first is that one cannot understand the role of social media in collective action without first taking into account the political environment in which they operate. The second principle states that a si…
Families and Networks of Internet Memes
This study employs a large-scale quantitative analysis to reveal structural patterns of internet memes, focusing on 2 forces that bind them together: the quiddities of each meme family and the generic attributes of the broader memetic sphere. Using content and network analysis of 1013 meme instances (including videos, images, and text), we explore memes' prevalent quiddity types and generic features, and the ways in which they relate to each othe…
Visible and invisible countries
In this paper the validity and limits of the news flow theory are examined, utilizing a large digital corpus of 35 popular news sites in 10 different languages over a three-year period. Three key variables were identified: GDP, foreign population and conflict intensity, collectively accounting for more than 70% of the variance of country prominence in the news. After offering a robust model, over-represented and under-represented countries are li…
America's Global Standing According to Popular News Sites From Around the World
The growing popularity and use of news Web sites around the world provides new possibilities for studying the position of the United States in the world system charted by digital news items. In this article, we look at 35 popular news sites in 10 different languages over a 2-year period, in order to assess the position of the United States in world news as well as to identify possible explanations for it. Our findings show that the United States …
Digital Diplomacy 2.0? A Cross-national Comparison of Public Engagement in Facebook and Twitter
Social media holds the potential to foster dialogue between nations and foreign populations. Yet only a few studies to date have investigated the manner in which digital diplomacy is practised by foreign ministries. Using Kent and Taylor’s framework for dialogic communication, this article explores the extent to which dialogic communication is adopted by foreign ministries in terms of content, media channels and public engagement. The results of …
The Bias of Provocation Narratives in International News
This paper explores how provocation narratives introduce political bias in international news. It is based on a two-step methodology. First, a network analysis of country co-mentions in American, British, French, and German news corpus shows that core countries (e.g., the United States) and their opponents (e.g., North Korea, Russia, Iran) are the most frequently cited in provocation narratives. Focusing on the case where provocation narratives a…
The Conditional Nature of Value-Based Proximity Between Countries
Media attention accorded to foreign countries constitutes a crucial facet of public diplomacy. Studies have shown that proximity in values is a key factor that determines such media attention. Models of media interest generally assume that the impact of value proximity is universal across countries with different societal value orientations. Yet this study shows that the effect of societal value orientation on media attention to foreign countries…
Mapping Diversities and Tracing Trends of Cultural Homogeneity/Heterogeneity in Cyberspace
Many Internet global commercial services were originally initiated in the United States and later exported to other countries, continents, and cultures. By analyzing content and form characteristics of two leading portal sites-MSN and Yahoo!-on 33 and 23 (respectively) of their local country homepages in a comparative and longitudinal study over a period of six months, this study addresses two research questions: What differences, if any, are fou…
I never thought I could get health information from the Internet!”
The Internet is a major source for health information but contributes to the digital divide and health disparities. Minorities with low literacy skills are at a particular disadvantage in obtaining online information. A website was created with health information presented through videos in Amharic and an interface that does not require reading skills to enable users with low/no literacy to navigate among topics. In all, 225 Israeli Ethiopian imm…
When news and memory come apart
Prominent communication theories find a strong association between the news and our perception of the world. In this article, we compare the country names mentioned in the news with those recalled from the memory of individuals from four different nationalities: the United States, Israel, China, and Switzerland. Our findings suggest a more nuanced relationship between the news and memory. Larger and stronger countries are prominent in both news a…
Textual network analysis
The growing volumes of information available today provide opportunities but also challenges for social scientists. This paper presents textual network analysis—a network analysis procedure that transforms any given text into a visual map of words co‐occurring together. It aims at scholars and students who are not familiar with network analysis, showing step‐by‐step how to use this approach and highlighting its advantages and applications. It dem…
Intergenerational Communication
Based on the Relational Dialectics Theory 2.0 and the concept of affordances, this study examined the competing discourses that animate the meaning of intergenerational communication among Israeli women. Three generations of women from nine families were interviewed about their perceptions and use of multiple channels–face-to-face communication, mobile phone calls, and WhatsApp chats–to communicate with each other. A contrapuntal analysis reveale…
The group-sphere model of international news flow
Why are some countries mentioned very frequently in international news while others are not? Seeking to improve previous explanations in the literature, this study employs a large corpus of news sites in 11 countries and 10 languages over a 3-year period. A systematic computer-driven analysis revealed a similar pattern common to international news in all countries. The best explanation for the prominence of a foreign country in the news included …
The footprint of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in online world news
This study measures the presence of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict in online news worldwide. Employing the authors' “Global Salience Meter” – a novel multilingual news-mining technique, based on proprietary software – the relative prominence of news stories involving Israel and Palestine was traced over a six-month period in the course of 2009 in 35 leading news sites in 10 languages. The findings show that both polities are among the most prom…
Power and Relatedness in the Construction of Images and Emotions Toward Foreign Countries
In this study, we systematically explore the relationships between the emotions that people have toward foreign countries and their attributes. We conducted surveys in two different countries–Japan and Israel, yet our findings reveal similar patterns. In both Japan and Israel, we found that the perceived power and relationship with foreign countries as well as their attributes can evoke certain types of emotions. The economic and political perfor…
Sharing Feelings and User Engagement on Twitter
This study explores how the expression of feelings and the use of personal pronouns on Twitter are associated with user engagement. Unlike most previous studies which focused on the types of emotions that generate user engagement, it uses the volume-control model, which also considers the social dimension of power. Looking at the usage of pronouns, it examines the balance achieved between popular messages that target larger groups and personalize…
Could leaders deflect from political scandals? Cross-national experiments on diversionary action in Israel and Japan
The diversionary theory of war is one of the best-known conflict initiation theories focusing on democratic leaders’ incentives to divert public attention away from political scandals or economic policy failures. While this assumption is well-known, few studies have examined if and how the use of force could divert public attention from such a scandal or failure. By using cross-national experiments in Japan and Israel, we provide empirical tests …
What you google is where you are from
What information do people search about other countries and why? In this study we coded and analyzed more than 15,000 Google searches related to France and Spain during a 16-year period, from 18 countries with diverse characteristics and relationships with France and Spain. We coded these search queries into topical categories. We also collected country-level variables to reflect the power of each country and its proximity to France and Spain. We…
Volume and control
How does information become power, who gains and who loses, and what are the implications of this process? As much of the information we produce today is available to very few global companies and governments it is crucial to develop new concepts and modify the existing theories on information and power. Drawing on the political economy of communication, sociology and information science literature, this paper introduces an analytical framework t…
Popular Searches in Google and Yahoo
In this article, the authors analyze the popular search queries used in Google and Yahoo! over a 24-month period, January 2004–December 2005. They develop and employ a new methodology and metrics to examine and assess the digital divide in information uses, looking at the extent of political searches and their accuracy and variety. The findings indicate that some countries, particularly Germany, Russia, and Ireland, display greater accuracy of se…
Mapping Diversities and Tracing Trends of Cultural Homogeneity/Heterogeneity in Cyberspace
Many Internet global commercial services were originally initiated in the United States and later exported to other countries, continents, and cultures. By analyzing content and form characteristics of two leading portal sites-MSN and Yahoo!-on 33 and 23 (respectively) of their local country homepages in a comparative and longitudinal study over a period of six months, this study addresses two research questions: What differences, if any, are fou…
The footprint of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in online world news
This study measures the presence of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict in online news worldwide. Employing the authors' “Global Salience Meter” – a novel multilingual news-mining technique, based on proprietary software – the relative prominence of news stories involving Israel and Palestine was traced over a six-month period in the course of 2009 in 35 leading news sites in 10 languages. The findings show that both polities are among the most prom…
Popular Searches in Google and Yahoo
In this article, the authors analyze the popular search queries used in Google and Yahoo! over a 24-month period, January 2004–December 2005. They develop and employ a new methodology and metrics to examine and assess the digital divide in information uses, looking at the extent of political searches and their accuracy and variety. The findings indicate that some countries, particularly Germany, Russia, and Ireland, display greater accuracy of se…
Exploring new web-based tools to identify public interest in science
There is scant research-based evidence regarding what the public is interested in knowing about science, and more knowledge is needed to tailor relevant and engaging formal and free-choice science environments for different publics. This methodological paper describes the potential and limitations of three existing web-based tools — Google Trends, Google Zeitgeist, and Google Insights for Search — for PUS research. It shows how these tools can be…
Seeking science information online
Which extrinsic cues motivate people to search for science-related information? For many science-related search queries, media attention and time during the academic year are highly correlated with changes in information seeking behavior (expressed by changes in the proportion of Google science-related searches). The data mining analysis presented here shows that changes in the volume of searches for general and well-established science terms are…
Social Media and the Arab Spring
The goal of this article is to place the role that social media plays in collective action within a more general theoretical structure, using the events of the Arab Spring as a case study. The article presents two broad theoretical principles. The first is that one cannot understand the role of social media in collective action without first taking into account the political environment in which they operate. The second principle states that a si…
When news and memory come apart
Prominent communication theories find a strong association between the news and our perception of the world. In this article, we compare the country names mentioned in the news with those recalled from the memory of individuals from four different nationalities: the United States, Israel, China, and Switzerland. Our findings suggest a more nuanced relationship between the news and memory. Larger and stronger countries are prominent in both news a…
America's Global Standing According to Popular News Sites From Around the World
The growing popularity and use of news Web sites around the world provides new possibilities for studying the position of the United States in the world system charted by digital news items. In this article, we look at 35 popular news sites in 10 different languages over a 2-year period, in order to assess the position of the United States in world news as well as to identify possible explanations for it. Our findings show that the United States …
The Conditional Nature of Value-Based Proximity Between Countries
Media attention accorded to foreign countries constitutes a crucial facet of public diplomacy. Studies have shown that proximity in values is a key factor that determines such media attention. Models of media interest generally assume that the impact of value proximity is universal across countries with different societal value orientations. Yet this study shows that the effect of societal value orientation on media attention to foreign countries…
Visible and invisible countries
In this paper the validity and limits of the news flow theory are examined, utilizing a large digital corpus of 35 popular news sites in 10 different languages over a three-year period. Three key variables were identified: GDP, foreign population and conflict intensity, collectively accounting for more than 70% of the variance of country prominence in the news. After offering a robust model, over-represented and under-represented countries are li…
The half-life of a “teachable moment”
Some science-related events stimulate public interest, and create a teachable moment in which the underlying science temporarily becomes more interesting. Here, media attention, expressed by Google News reference volume, and changes in information seeking behavior, expressed by Google Trends, were used to estimate the length of a teachable moment for 2004–2011 Nobel Prize announcements. On average, Nobel Prize announcements attracted the attentio…
Digital Diplomacy 2.0? A Cross-national Comparison of Public Engagement in Facebook and Twitter
Social media holds the potential to foster dialogue between nations and foreign populations. Yet only a few studies to date have investigated the manner in which digital diplomacy is practised by foreign ministries. Using Kent and Taylor’s framework for dialogic communication, this article explores the extent to which dialogic communication is adopted by foreign ministries in terms of content, media channels and public engagement. The results of …
The group-sphere model of international news flow
Why are some countries mentioned very frequently in international news while others are not? Seeking to improve previous explanations in the literature, this study employs a large corpus of news sites in 11 countries and 10 languages over a 3-year period. A systematic computer-driven analysis revealed a similar pattern common to international news in all countries. The best explanation for the prominence of a foreign country in the news included …
Just Spell US Right
This study evaluates America's prominence in world affairs by analyzing the content of key news sites from around the world over three years. Findings show that the United States remains by far the most prominent country in news sites from around the world, particularly in the categories of business, technology, and world-news. While world attention to most rising regional powers such as Brazil, Russia, and India remained low, China increased its…
Families and Networks of Internet Memes
This study employs a large-scale quantitative analysis to reveal structural patterns of internet memes, focusing on 2 forces that bind them together: the quiddities of each meme family and the generic attributes of the broader memetic sphere. Using content and network analysis of 1013 meme instances (including videos, images, and text), we explore memes' prevalent quiddity types and generic features, and the ways in which they relate to each othe…
International News Flow Online
Contents: International News Flow Online - The Economic Newsworthiness of Countries - International News Is American - Global and Regional Trends in News Prominence - Many Local Views - A Local Outlook on a Global Conflict - Short-Term Effect: Agenda Setting and the News-Memory Nexus - Long-Term Effect: News, Global Views, and Soft Power
From propaganda to alarm
Temporal patterns of scientific information-seeking on Google and Wikipedia
In response to the news coverage of scientific events and to science education, people increasingly go online to get more information. This study investigates how patterns of science and technology information-seeking on Google and Wikipedia change over time, in ways that differ between “ad hoc” terms that correspond to news coverage and “cyclic” terms that correspond to the academic period. Findings show that the science and technology activity …
I never thought I could get health information from the Internet!”
The Internet is a major source for health information but contributes to the digital divide and health disparities. Minorities with low literacy skills are at a particular disadvantage in obtaining online information. A website was created with health information presented through videos in Amharic and an interface that does not require reading skills to enable users with low/no literacy to navigate among topics. In all, 225 Israeli Ethiopian imm…
Is Israel’s low rank on international achievement tests really surprising
Israel’s consistently low ranking on international achievement tests has been exclusively attributed to insufficient investments in education or inefficient use of available resources. In contrast, this article shows this low ranking to be a true reflection of Israel’s reality in terms of characteristics that affect the mean ability of its student population to profit from schooling (MAPS). Israel’s actual ranking on the PISA test among the 34 OE…
Theorizing Provocation Narratives as Communication Strategies
Despite multiple uses, the concept of provocation is undertheorized and underinvestigated. Theorizing provocation narratives as communication strategies, this article shows that what is at stake in provocations are crucial issues of intentionality, accountability, and blame. While some provocations elicit reactions that are beneficial to the parties involved, others may incite violence. The second part of our study focuses on the latter because o…
The Bias of Provocation Narratives in International News
This paper explores how provocation narratives introduce political bias in international news. It is based on a two-step methodology. First, a network analysis of country co-mentions in American, British, French, and German news corpus shows that core countries (e.g., the United States) and their opponents (e.g., North Korea, Russia, Iran) are the most frequently cited in provocation narratives. Focusing on the case where provocation narratives a…
Global and local “teachable moments”
This study examined to what extent Nobel Prize announcements and awards trigger global and local searches or “teachable moments” related to the laureates and their discoveries. We examined the longitudinal trends in Google searches for the names and discoveries of Nobel laureates from 2012 to 2017. The findings show that Nobel Prize events clearly trigger more searches for laureates, but also for their respective discoveries. We suggest that fasc…
Volume and control
How does information become power, who gains and who loses, and what are the implications of this process? As much of the information we produce today is available to very few global companies and governments it is crucial to develop new concepts and modify the existing theories on information and power. Drawing on the political economy of communication, sociology and information science literature, this paper introduces an analytical framework t…
Social Media Mobility
Recent years have seen mass adoption of social media by ministries of foreign affairs (MFAs). However, diplomats are still searching for ways to evaluate their online activity and assess the impact of online activities on offline diplomacy. This article argues that the centrality of a diplomatic institution to a Twitter network of its peer can be used to evaluate both online and offline diplomacy. Central actors on Twitter can set diplomats’ offl…
Political science (25 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Social Media and Politics (21 works) · Law (19 works) · Law (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Media Studies and Communication (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · World Wide Web (11 works)