I'm a sociologist and communication scholar specializing in research about language, culture and communication on the Internet.
In October 2000 I retired as Professor of Sociology and Communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I am now a Research Affiliate in Anthropology at
Yale University. In 2001 I published Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online (Berg, Oxford), a set of five studies of linguistic and visual
aspects of online communication in the late 1990s, including the language of email, ASCII art, verbal and visual performance on IRC, digital greetings, and "font frenzy."
A Companion Website, including a sample chapter and links to reviews, is here.A second area of interest is multilingualism on the Internet. Until recently, nearly all research reported in the English-language literature about CMC (computer-mediated communication) was about native English only, even though hundreds of millions of people are communicating in other languages or in non-native English. Together with Susan C. Herring, in 2003 I edited a special issue of the Journal of Computer-mediated Communication called "The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture and Communication in Instant Messaging, Email and Chat." An extended print volume, The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture and Communication Online, appeared in May 2007 (Oxford University Press), Table of Contents here or here. Also, the book's contents are available via Oxford Scholarship Online. Keywords and chapter abstracts are freely available, but searchable pdf versions of chapters are downloadable only via institutional subscription. In 2005 I wrote a paper entitled "'What a Wonderful Du-Krav This is!': Flaming, Gender and Culture on an English-Language Listserv for Israelis." A short version was presented by video at the Fifth Annual Conference, Israel Association for Language and Society, Open University, Ra'anana, Israel, June 2006, downloadable here. (Note: it takes several minutes to load, in either Internet Explorer or Netscape, not Firefox). Opening and closing remarks are in Hebrew, but the main presentation and slides are in English. A revised version was commissioned by Dieter Stein, Susan C. Herring, and Tuija Virtunen, eds., Handbook of the Pragmatics of Computer-mediated Communication (Mouton de Gruyter, in preparation), and is called, "Flaming and Linguistic Impoliteness on an English-language Listserv for Israelis." Susan Herring and I also prepared a chapter on multilingualism online for M. Hellinger & A. Pauwels (Eds.), Language and Communication: Diversity and Change, vol. 9, Handbooks of Applied Linguistics (Mouton de Gruyter, 2007). Recently, I was invited by Joan Swann and Janet Maybin to prepare a chapter on "Computer-mediated English," for their volume in preparation, Routledge Companion to English Language Studies. Here too, I plan to discuss both native and non-native English online. Elihu Katz and I have begun a project about clients, bureaucrats and professionals in the era of new media. We hope to edit a book to update our 1973 publication, Elihu Katz and Brenda Danet (eds.), Bureaucracy and the Public: A Reader in Official-Client Relations, Basic Books. While there is an abundance of academic literature on how the Internet and mobile phones are changing politics and government, social and family life, religion, and so on, there has been little systematic attention to how they influence clients' dealings with a variety of bureaucrats and professionals (a notable exception is the highly developed field of medical informatics). Our book will address these concerns. 
Continuing work begun in Cyberpl@y, I completed four papers on art and communication on IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Two papers that appeared in 2003 and 2004,
respectively, discuss this art as a form of digital "quilting:" Textile: The
Journal of Cloth & Culture (pre-publication version, text only),and
Textile , a special issue, "Digital Textiles 1," ed. Janis Jefferies
(pre-publication version). A third paper shows how the classic anthropological concepts of
play, myth and ritual illuminate rainbow art and communication, and was published in Media Anthropology
edited by Eric Rothenbuhler and Mihai Coman (Sage, 2005) (pre-publication version
). A fourth paper is called "Pixel Patchwork: A Digital Folk Art"
(draft).Another paper combines long-term interests in the history and aesthetics of writing and in Japanese art, literature and culture. Applying an ethnographic perspective to materials usually studied by students of Japanese art and literature, I attempt to reconstruct the logistics of calligraphy and calligraphic performance in the everyday life of aristocrats at the Japanese court about a thousand years ago. Brief written messages--poems--were exchanged not only in letters but in real-time interaction, somewhat paralleling today's instant messaging, SMS, and chat, though the sociocultural and technological context was vastly different from that of today's online communication. A pre-publication version of this paper is here. Go to my Full CV. Go to my Recent Papers. Go to the Cyberpl@y Website. Go to the Photo Gallery Go to the Table of Contents for The Multilingual Internet This page was added to the site January 9, 2003, and was last updated January 16, 2008.
|