Nicholas A John
Biographic Data
| ID | 4266442 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicholas A John |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicholas A |
| FAMILY NAME | John |
| SIGNATURE | JOHN N A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9955-4120 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 96 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 34 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
‘That’s not where the cart goes!’
Outrage is a popular way to generate attention on social media, from ragebait and trolling to callouts. Cultural producers also harness social shaming as a content production strategy, repurposing the model of activism-driven callout culture as a form of accountability entertainment, or content that both stages and spectacularizes the intervention into misbehavior. We focus on Cart Narcs, a leading cross-platform provider of accountability entert…
Feeling Myself
This study aims to theorize the parasocial relationships between podcast creators and listeners, but with a unique focus on the perspective of the creators themselves. While parasocial relationships are typically studied from the perspective of the audience, understanding the creator's viewpoint can provide valuable insights into the dynamics of these relationships and the modes of addressivity they evoke, particularly with the emergence of intim…
A Classification of Features for Interpersonal Disconnectivity in Digital Media
This article presents for the first time a classification of, and lexicon for, features for dissolving interpersonal ties in digital environments: blocking, unfriending, unfollowing, muting, withholding, and ejecting. There are two main motivations and two main contributions. The first motivation is that analyses of social media features have not included treatment of features for interpersonal disconnectivity; the second is that analyses of inte…
It’s between me and myself
This article explores how podcasters address their invisible—and thus imagined—audience. Based on in-depth interviews, we examine how different ways of imagining the listener evoke specific strategies of addressivity and analyze the connection between these imaginaries and the concept of intimacy as understood and performed by podcasters. We introduce a working definition of the “imagined podcast listener” and present a typology of eight types of…
A moment of turbulence
The rapid adoption of digital technologies during COVID-19 lockdowns offers a unique perspective on differences in privacy cultures. In this study, we compare how cultural predisposition and identities relate to privacy during the transition to remote learning in higher education in Estonia, France, and Israel. We conducted 83 in-depth interviews with academics, who talked about their adoption of communication technologies and strategies for mana…
Turn It on! Turn It on? Privacy Management of Pupils and Teachers in Online Learning During Covid-19 Lockdowns in Germany and Israel
The transition to emergency remote teaching (ERT) through the use of video conferencing software during the COVID-19 lockdowns posed significant challenges to privacy management for both pupils and teachers across the world. One question became pivotal: Must I turn my camera on? While the question of turning on one's camera has pedagogical consequences, our study sets out to examine the implications for pupils' and teachers' privacy. Focusing on …
Introduction to the special issue of social media
As social media scholarship pervades the communication discipline, it is time to reflect on the good, bad, and ugly of social media. The theme for this special issue is inspired in part by the 1966 film, “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” Like its portrayal of the American Civil War, we again face deep divisions. The question is what role is social media helping us to heal those divides versus fragmenting us further? The seven articles in this is…
Online Spaces, Impossible Imaginaries, and Synthetic Sociality
Social media enable the formation of unprecedented numbers of ties, and allow for communication at an unprecedented scale. Features such as unfriending and muting on the one hand, and favoriting and “close friends” on the other, enable users to manage this abundance, allowing them to silence certain voices and to enhance certain others. These features create situations that sometimes cannot be mapped onto familiar offline scenarios. We argue that…
Privacy and distance learning in turbulent times
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-str…
Online tie and content management and changing religious identity among Muslim Arab women in Israel
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-pre…
A history of features for online tie breaking, 1997-2021
Online spaces provide opportunities for creating ties with other people, allowing us to communicate and share content with them. Sometimes, though, we wish to break some of these ties; we wish not only to friend and to follow, but to unfriend and unfollow as well. In this paper, we present a history of the many features for online interpersonal disconnectivity, showing how they have developed over time. We present five main findings: the language…
Making a complex story simple
This article offers an account of the absence of media in general, and social media in particular, from a set of life story narratives. After conducting both unstructured life story interviews and semi-structured interviews with 15 Muslim Palestinian women in Israel, we analyzed the stories presented in each interview and the explanations given by interviewees for excluding items about (social) media from their life stories. Interviewees resolved…
The concept of ‘sharing’ in Chinese social media
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 gongx…
Sharing and social media
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 …
Privacy, Covid-19 and Online Teaching
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 E…
Cart Narcs and the Engineering of Social Shaming as Entertainment
With around 160 videos, 160,000 subscribers, and 18 million views, Cart Narcs is an “elite” YouTube channel. The typical Cart Narcs YouTube video is framed around the idea of shaming people who do not return their shopping carts. The eponymous Narc, Agent Sebastian, patrols grocery store parking lots looking for miscreants to confront and film. When he spots a target, he runs towards them making siren noises. "Cart Narcs!" he shouts. "That's not …
Social Media and Religious Identity Change Among Muslim Arab Women in Israel
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 fin…
Punching up or turning away? Palestinians unfriending Jewish Israelis on Facebook
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 min…
Imagining An Ideal Podcast Listener
Based on a close reading of the adult coloring book and listening party kit published to accompany NPR’s podcast Invisibilia, this article examines the ideal listener of, and the ideal mode of listening to, audio storytelling podcasts. We argue that these texts prompt the notion of childlike listening, a mode of listening that harnesses the innocence and curiosity of the child for the sake of deep discussion and interpersonal connection. This ide…
An agnotological analysis of APIs
Adopting an agnotological perspective, this article extends the critical literature on APIs (application programing interfaces) by systematically showing that social media APIs are largely blind to acts of disconnectivity such as unfriending and unliking. We do this through analysis of the traces of social media usage that are not accessible through APIs as gleaned from the technical documentation published for developers by 12 major SNSs. Our fi…
Social Media Bullshit
If we live in media, then our knowledge of our social lives must, at least partly, come from those media. It is in this context that I analyze www.facebook.com/peace , a page that claims to show 'how many new friendships formed just yesterday' between Facebook users from the opposing sides of three different protracted conflicts. However, the numbers seem unfeasible, leading to a series of attempts to try and evaluate them independently, as well …
Unpacking (the) secret
This study focuses on the perceptions and practices of anonymous communication with friends enabled by tie-based anonymous apps. Based on qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with users of the application Secret, the strategies deployed by interviewees in order to de-anonymize other users are emphasized and placed within the broader context of the real-name web. The article shows that Secret was not only based on pre-existing social networ…
Deaf and Hard of Hearing Smartphone Users
This article shows how smartphone usage among deaf and hard of hearing (HoH) people is shaped by “normative” communication values, and how smartphones, despite seeming accessible, can reproduce hegemonic communicative norms. Qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews conducted in Israel shows that social norms of voice calls impact other smartphone interactions, such that people who cannot perform voice calls are required to obey vocal norms of …
Why privacy keeps dying
It is a curious fact how much talk about privacy is about the end of privacy. We term this ‘privacy endism,’ locating the phenomenon within a broader category of endist thought. We then analyze 101 newspaper articles between 1990 and 2012 that declare the end of privacy. Three findings follow. First, claims about the end of privacy point to an unusually broad range of technological and institutional causes. Privacy has been pronounced defunct for…
The rise of ‘sharing’ in communication and media studies
In May 2014, a group of scholars came together to discuss sharing and its meanings in the digital era.Some of these scholars had been enquiring into the meaning of sharing for some time; others saw the call for papers for a conference on the topic of sharing as an opportunity to frame their work in terms of a concept that offered the potential for new insights and fresh paths of analysis.All of them presented rich analyses and critiques of practi…
Sharing and Web 2.0
Sharing is the constitutive activity of Web 2.0. But when did ‘sharing’ become the term used to describe the activities that constitute participation in Web 2.0? What does sharing mean in this context? What is its rhetorical force? This paper argues that a new meaning of sharing has emerged in the context of Web 2.0 with three main features: fuzzy objects of sharing; the use of the word ‘share’ with no object at all; and presenting in terms of sh…
An agnotological analysis of APIs
Adopting an agnotological perspective, this article extends the critical literature on APIs (application programing interfaces) by systematically showing that social media APIs are largely blind to acts of disconnectivity such as unfriending and unliking. We do this through analysis of the traces of social media usage that are not accessible through APIs as gleaned from the technical documentation published for developers by 12 major SNSs. Our fi…
Deaf and Hard of Hearing Smartphone Users
This article shows how smartphone usage among deaf and hard of hearing (HoH) people is shaped by “normative” communication values, and how smartphones, despite seeming accessible, can reproduce hegemonic communicative norms. Qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews conducted in Israel shows that social norms of voice calls impact other smartphone interactions, such that people who cannot perform voice calls are required to obey vocal norms of …
Global Habitus, Local Stratification, and Symbolic Struggles Over Identity
Employing Bourdieu's concepts of field and habitus, this article argues that McDonaldization, and by extension globalization, is a social and cultural practice, implemented by actors, with intentions, motivations, and goals. This analytical approach accomplishes two important objectives: first, it moves away from an agentless view of globalization, viewing it instead as a social practice demanding forms of skills and strategies used by actors, an…
Sharing and social media
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 …
Imagining An Ideal Podcast Listener
Based on a close reading of the adult coloring book and listening party kit published to accompany NPR’s podcast Invisibilia, this article examines the ideal listener of, and the ideal mode of listening to, audio storytelling podcasts. We argue that these texts prompt the notion of childlike listening, a mode of listening that harnesses the innocence and curiosity of the child for the sake of deep discussion and interpersonal connection. This ide…
The Construction of the Multilingual Internet
This paper examines the technologies that enable the representation of Hebrew on websites. Hebrew is written from right to left and in non-Latin characters, issues shared by a number of languages which seem to be converging on a shared solution-Unicode. Regarding the case of Hebrew, I show how competing solutions have given way to one dominant technology. I link processes in the Israeli context with broader questions about the 'multilingual Inter…
Punching up or turning away? Palestinians unfriending Jewish Israelis on Facebook
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 min…
Unpacking (the) secret
This study focuses on the perceptions and practices of anonymous communication with friends enabled by tie-based anonymous apps. Based on qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with users of the application Secret, the strategies deployed by interviewees in order to de-anonymize other users are emphasized and placed within the broader context of the real-name web. The article shows that Secret was not only based on pre-existing social networ…
It’s between me and myself
This article explores how podcasters address their invisible—and thus imagined—audience. Based on in-depth interviews, we examine how different ways of imagining the listener evoke specific strategies of addressivity and analyze the connection between these imaginaries and the concept of intimacy as understood and performed by podcasters. We introduce a working definition of the “imagined podcast listener” and present a typology of eight types of…
Turn It on! Turn It on? Privacy Management of Pupils and Teachers in Online Learning During Covid-19 Lockdowns in Germany and Israel
The transition to emergency remote teaching (ERT) through the use of video conferencing software during the COVID-19 lockdowns posed significant challenges to privacy management for both pupils and teachers across the world. One question became pivotal: Must I turn my camera on? While the question of turning on one's camera has pedagogical consequences, our study sets out to examine the implications for pupils' and teachers' privacy. Focusing on …
A history of features for online tie breaking, 1997-2021
Online spaces provide opportunities for creating ties with other people, allowing us to communicate and share content with them. Sometimes, though, we wish to break some of these ties; we wish not only to friend and to follow, but to unfriend and unfollow as well. In this paper, we present a history of the many features for online interpersonal disconnectivity, showing how they have developed over time. We present five main findings: the language…
Social Media Bullshit
If we live in media, then our knowledge of our social lives must, at least partly, come from those media. It is in this context that I analyze www.facebook.com/peace , a page that claims to show 'how many new friendships formed just yesterday' between Facebook users from the opposing sides of three different protracted conflicts. However, the numbers seem unfeasible, leading to a series of attempts to try and evaluate them independently, as well …
The diffusion of the Internet to Israel
This article portrays the first decade of Internet connectivity in Israel. It focuses on the technology of the Internet, i.e. on the cables and wires that carry the Internet around the world, and on the bureaucratic processes that are called into play as the Internet reaches a new country. While the Internet appears to be a supranational technology, its institutionalization in Israel – and indeed throughout the world – can be seen to have been he…
Walter Felsenstein inszeniert Mozart/Die Hochzeit des Figaro
Opera Guides
Guides
Stage design
Global Habitus, Local Stratification, and Symbolic Struggles Over Identity
Employing Bourdieu's concepts of field and habitus, this article argues that McDonaldization, and by extension globalization, is a social and cultural practice, implemented by actors, with intentions, motivations, and goals. This analytical approach accomplishes two important objectives: first, it moves away from an agentless view of globalization, viewing it instead as a social practice demanding forms of skills and strategies used by actors, an…
The diffusion of the Internet to Israel
This article portrays the first decade of Internet connectivity in Israel. It focuses on the technology of the Internet, i.e. on the cables and wires that carry the Internet around the world, and on the bureaucratic processes that are called into play as the Internet reaches a new country. While the Internet appears to be a supranational technology, its institutionalization in Israel – and indeed throughout the world – can be seen to have been he…
Sharing and Web 2.0
Sharing is the constitutive activity of Web 2.0. But when did ‘sharing’ become the term used to describe the activities that constitute participation in Web 2.0? What does sharing mean in this context? What is its rhetorical force? This paper argues that a new meaning of sharing has emerged in the context of Web 2.0 with three main features: fuzzy objects of sharing; the use of the word ‘share’ with no object at all; and presenting in terms of sh…
The Construction of the Multilingual Internet
This paper examines the technologies that enable the representation of Hebrew on websites. Hebrew is written from right to left and in non-Latin characters, issues shared by a number of languages which seem to be converging on a shared solution-Unicode. Regarding the case of Hebrew, I show how competing solutions have given way to one dominant technology. I link processes in the Israeli context with broader questions about the 'multilingual Inter…
“I Don't Like You Any More”
This article explores Facebook unfriending during the Israel–Gaza conflict of 2014. We suggest that politically motivated unfriending is a new kind of political gesture. We present an analysis of a survey of 1,013 Jewish Israeli Facebook users. A total of 16% of users unfriended or unfollowed a Facebook friend during the fighting. Unfriending was more prevalent among more ideologically extreme and more politically active Facebook users. Weak ties…
The rise of ‘sharing’ in communication and media studies
In May 2014, a group of scholars came together to discuss sharing and its meanings in the digital era.Some of these scholars had been enquiring into the meaning of sharing for some time; others saw the call for papers for a conference on the topic of sharing as an opportunity to frame their work in terms of a concept that offered the potential for new insights and fresh paths of analysis.All of them presented rich analyses and critiques of practi…
Why privacy keeps dying
It is a curious fact how much talk about privacy is about the end of privacy. We term this ‘privacy endism,’ locating the phenomenon within a broader category of endist thought. We then analyze 101 newspaper articles between 1990 and 2012 that declare the end of privacy. Three findings follow. First, claims about the end of privacy point to an unusually broad range of technological and institutional causes. Privacy has been pronounced defunct for…
Unpacking (the) secret
This study focuses on the perceptions and practices of anonymous communication with friends enabled by tie-based anonymous apps. Based on qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with users of the application Secret, the strategies deployed by interviewees in order to de-anonymize other users are emphasized and placed within the broader context of the real-name web. The article shows that Secret was not only based on pre-existing social networ…
Deaf and Hard of Hearing Smartphone Users
This article shows how smartphone usage among deaf and hard of hearing (HoH) people is shaped by “normative” communication values, and how smartphones, despite seeming accessible, can reproduce hegemonic communicative norms. Qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews conducted in Israel shows that social norms of voice calls impact other smartphone interactions, such that people who cannot perform voice calls are required to obey vocal norms of …
Imagining An Ideal Podcast Listener
Based on a close reading of the adult coloring book and listening party kit published to accompany NPR’s podcast Invisibilia, this article examines the ideal listener of, and the ideal mode of listening to, audio storytelling podcasts. We argue that these texts prompt the notion of childlike listening, a mode of listening that harnesses the innocence and curiosity of the child for the sake of deep discussion and interpersonal connection. This ide…
An agnotological analysis of APIs
Adopting an agnotological perspective, this article extends the critical literature on APIs (application programing interfaces) by systematically showing that social media APIs are largely blind to acts of disconnectivity such as unfriending and unliking. We do this through analysis of the traces of social media usage that are not accessible through APIs as gleaned from the technical documentation published for developers by 12 major SNSs. Our fi…
Social Media Bullshit
If we live in media, then our knowledge of our social lives must, at least partly, come from those media. It is in this context that I analyze www.facebook.com/peace , a page that claims to show 'how many new friendships formed just yesterday' between Facebook users from the opposing sides of three different protracted conflicts. However, the numbers seem unfeasible, leading to a series of attempts to try and evaluate them independently, as well …
Social Media and Religious Identity Change Among Muslim Arab Women in Israel
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 fin…
Punching up or turning away? Palestinians unfriending Jewish Israelis on Facebook
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 min…
Privacy, Covid-19 and Online Teaching
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 E…
Cart Narcs and the Engineering of Social Shaming as Entertainment
With around 160 videos, 160,000 subscribers, and 18 million views, Cart Narcs is an “elite” YouTube channel. The typical Cart Narcs YouTube video is framed around the idea of shaming people who do not return their shopping carts. The eponymous Narc, Agent Sebastian, patrols grocery store parking lots looking for miscreants to confront and film. When he spots a target, he runs towards them making siren noises. "Cart Narcs!" he shouts. "That's not …
The concept of ‘sharing’ in Chinese social media
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 gongx…
Sharing and social media
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 …
Introduction to the special issue of social media
As social media scholarship pervades the communication discipline, it is time to reflect on the good, bad, and ugly of social media. The theme for this special issue is inspired in part by the 1966 film, “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” Like its portrayal of the American Civil War, we again face deep divisions. The question is what role is social media helping us to heal those divides versus fragmenting us further? The seven articles in this is…
Online Spaces, Impossible Imaginaries, and Synthetic Sociality
Social media enable the formation of unprecedented numbers of ties, and allow for communication at an unprecedented scale. Features such as unfriending and muting on the one hand, and favoriting and “close friends” on the other, enable users to manage this abundance, allowing them to silence certain voices and to enhance certain others. These features create situations that sometimes cannot be mapped onto familiar offline scenarios. We argue that…
Privacy and distance learning in turbulent times
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-str…
Computer Science (25 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Political science (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Internet privacy (16 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Social media (15 works) · World Wide Web (14 works) · Social Media and Politics (13 works) · Social Psychology (10 works)