I am an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Haifa, Israel. I research how organizations and individuals use media technologies and their attendant rhetoric to promise and provide solutions for social problems. I also study mediated representations and understandings of economic life. I teach courses on the culture and IT industries, media institutions, economic communication and content analysis methods. I support Arsenal and the University of Michigan football and basketball teams (I like to suffer), and listen to podcasts on my commute and when I wash the dishes. I also subscribe to a bunch of newsletters I find efficiently useful for research. Sometimes, I read books.

You can find my Google Scholar profile with an updated list of publications here.

Current research projects

I am interested in the power the IT industry wields as a political and social institution. Recently, I have been studying the political activism of IT industry firms, investors and workers in Israel and the U.S. within the context of backsliding democracies. I am the PI of a 4 year ISF (Israel Science Foundation) funded project titled “Re-purposing industries and networks: IT industry actors’ public interventions in contentious politics” which will run from 2024 to 2028. Related to this project, I co-organized with the Institute for Information Policy at PSU an ICA pre-conference on the political power of the IT industry.

Earlier, I was co-PI with Dr. Eran Tamir (Tel Aviv University) of a 3 year ISF (Israel Science Foundation) funded project titled “Reproducing ‘start-up nation’? The Israeli technology sector’s interventions in the field of education“. In this project, we studied (and continue studying) the activities of technology firms and workers in Israeli public education. Our first article (open access) examined the motivations of volunteering tech workers and executives. A second article (open access) considers what happens when the temporalities of public education and the technology industry collide (the industry’s temporal tendencies to focus on short-term projects dominate the longer-term focus of public education).

I was co-PI with Dr. Nir Grinberg (Ben-Gurion University) of a 3 year Ministry of Science and Technology funded project examining how assistive computational technologies impact interpersonal communication. As part of this project we conducted an algorithmic audit of the Smart Reply feature deployed on GMail to offer users suggested responses.

For the past few years, I have been studying whether crowdfunding attenuates, replicates or intensifies social hierarchies (in collaboration with Dr. Nat Poor and Prof. Yariv Tsfati). The latest publication in this line of research (led by Dr. Niv Mor) examines the crowdfunding of journalism.

I have returned to an old stomping ground together with my colleague Prof. Oren Meyers to re-interview Israeli journalists we last interviewed about a decade ago. We’re doing this as part of a Neaman Institute-funded research group at the Technion on independent journalism (עיתונות עצמאית). Our study focuses on how journalists perceive the pressures exerted upon them and considers the private uses of public journalism in a clientelist political system. A first methodological paper on the value of longitudinal qualitative interviews was published (with Prof. Meyers) in the Journal of Communication.

I am interested in how entrepreneurship influences media production. I have studied for some years the entrepreneurial careers of journalists (with Prof. Oren Meyers). I am now studying with Dr. Sharon Ringel what journalists delete from their Twitter account and why (initial report) linking labor conditions to journalists’ deletion practices. A first academic article from this line of research was published (open access) in New Media & Society.

I’m also perennially interested in how economic phenomena are presented in the popular media. My latest contribution examined Money, explained, a Netflix-distributed short series, explaining topics such as student loans, gambling, and more.

Selected Publications