Research

My research agenda evolved and changed over the years as I went through various academic and professional experiences. I started my student career in economics and over time became fascinated with media and communication. On the one hand, being an immigrant, I was interested in immigrant and minority media, on the other hand, I was fascinated by media economics. The second interest prevailed and in my Master’s thesis I merged literature in industrial economics and political economy in order to capture the soft power of the media in evaluation of mass media industries. While working on my Master’s, and through my professional activities and involvement with the ITU Youth Program, I became interested in media, information, and communication technologies. Pursuing this interest led me to Cornell, where I am currently working on my PhD.

During my years at Cornell I have developed a research program with two complimentary threads. The first thread focuses on the policymaking processes and the international governance of media, information, and communication. The second focuses on the social and political implications of information and communication technologies, specifically the practices of technology use and the politics of communication platforms.

My policy- and gvernance-oriented research centers on the inner workings of domestic and international institutions that govern and influence emerging communication environments. My dissertation focuses specifically on Internet-related policy formulation as it unfolds in non-binding, consultative settings, such as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). The IGF is a unique diplomatic experiment within the UN system and international policymaking, one that attracts a high level participation from governments, industry, and civil society even though participation is voluntary and its decisions are non-binding. In this context, my research looks at two primary components of the policy process. On the one hand, through textual analysis of its deliberations, I study the emerging discourse of the information society within the IGF itself. On the other hand, through participant observations and elite interviews, I examine how policy debates within the IGF reflect the personal views, institutional and national identities, and interests of the key players. Together, my study draws a picture of how individual perceptions, interest, as well as political and economic powers mold the information society through the shaping of the communication policy.

My research on the social and political implications of information and communication technologies focuses on technology use and its implications for democracy and developments, and on politics of communication platforms. The latest project I am involved in looks at the online routines of the “digital natives” with particular interest in how the young adults in different cultures utilize URLs in their daily practices. Other projects in this thread looked on how communication platforms mediate discourse. This is a particularly interesting topic in light of the emerging prominence of grassroots media and collaborative content creation, including in policy-making activities. Among initiatives in this area you can find the WikiCandidate project and a study of the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the blogosphere I co-authored some time ago.

I will update this page as time goes by and I will try to share more of my work here as it becomes available. Stay tuned!

(last updated, September 2010)