Online tie and content management and changing religious identity among Muslim Arab women in Israel

ABSTRACT

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-presentation. The first is relatively predictable, whereby users reconstruct their social environment to fit their new religious identity. The second logic concerns the management of ties and content in accordance with religious obligations in ways that may not fit the user’s personal welfare, and which are related to complex inner conflicts of the user. While previous literature stresses personal welfare as a main factor behind online tie and content management, in this article we show how users are willing to sacrifice their online welfare for the sake of their new identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Online tie management
• social media
• identity
• Muslim women
• digital religion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names have been changed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aysha Agbarya

Aysha Agbarya is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (supervisor: Dr. Nicholas John). She holds both a Master's and a Bachelor's degree in Communication from Haifa University. Research interests: media use in everyday life, identity and de-westernization of communication theories. Her current research focuses on the relations between social media use and identity. In particular, her Ph.D. research deals with social media use during religious identity change among Muslim women in Israel, while negotiating current new media research assumptions and theories which are laid on studying “western mainstream communities” [e-mail: [email protected]].

Nicholas John

Nicholas John is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of The Age of Sharing. His research interests include unfriending, sharing, and the limits of our knowledge about social media [e-mail: [email protected]].