JCMC releases article on Strategic Management of Religious Websites in Israel's Orthodox Communities

This study investigates how webmasters of sites affiliated with bounded communities manage tensions created by the open social affordances of the internet. We examine how webmasters strategically manage their respective websites to accommodate their assumed target audiences. Through in-depth interviews with Orthodox webmasters in Israel, we uncover how they cultivate 3 unique strategies -- control, layering, and guiding -- to contain information flows. We thereby elucidate how web strategies reflect the relationships between community, religion and CMC.

While the Internet offers great benefits such as instant connectivity and diverse information sources, many people in bounded communities see this as a threat and think it is best to keep distance from outsiders. Bounded communities are people in a group who have the same geographic or ideological boundaries and decide to keep distance from outsiders. The term "taming technology" is used in the article, which describes choices in technology use that aim to evaluate, monitor, and control its adoption to protect community beliefs. The point of the study was to build on taming technology while looking at it from the perspective of those who mediate the offline/online transference that occurs as Orthodox Jews interact with the Internet. It is important to note that Orthodox Jews are not one group, but made up of various communities such as Sephardim, Lithuanians, Hassidim, and Religious-Zionists. There are also Sephardic, Lithuanian, and Hassidic groups that are often referred to as ultra-Orthodox. The aim of the study is to learn how webmasters strategically manage their online endeavors to address their target audiences and to support their assumed target communities’ efforts to manage their boundaries with the modern world. To conduct the study, three website were selected to observe and have semi structured in-depth interviews. The three websites were bhol.co.il, kipa.co.il, and koogle.zap.co.il. Data analysis was used and it was found that two main themes emerged. The first theme concerns the challenges faced by target audiences when they consider engaging with technology, while the second theme reflects webmaster regulation of three facets of their websites (content, user access, and user discourse). Data analysis revealed the emergence of three regulation strategies utilized by webmasters to address the challenges, as they portray them, of their assumed target audiences when using the internet. The three regulation strategies were control, layered, and guided. This study contributes to knowledge about bounded communities and CMC on three levels:
A.) This study reveals that religious webmasters must be skilled at interpreting their communities to provide options for ‘kosher engagement’ while opening up their closed groups to the social affordances afforded by online interaction
B.) The study illuminates three unique strategies employed by religious web entrepreneurs who are not merely taming the internet, but are providing innovative online experiences to bounded community members
C.) The study provides an alternate narrative about fundamentalist, bounded Jewish communities’ relationships with the Internet.

The conclusion here is preliminary, and should be validated by future studies of bounded communities’ engagement in other digital environments.

For more information, please refer to: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12118/full