Read Tobin Belzer's Study

“the image is replacing the word as the predominant means of mental transport.”

- Mitchell Stevens, The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word 

Mental transport is a fun way to think about texts and images. As people who were once labeled as bookish (hence the seventh century ‘people of the book’ moniker) we pay special attention to coded messages, particularly textual ones. What has changed about the symbols which lead us into mental transport? Simply put, people spend a significant amount of their time these days making choices about what they want to read, to watch, to buy, or to do by typing commands into screens that are hooked up to global networks. But that definition of the change discounts the most important new reality – that people are inputting new data into these devices – photos, videos, tweets, comments, thumbs up and down, and sharing them with friends and strangers. As a result, new ideas and activities spread rapidly, opinions are gauged, the lines between public and private are blurred and inter-personal relationships are seen in a new light.

Is this good for the Jews? Now that we are seeing new ways in which people share text, and pair text with images both static and moving, we have a new layer of commentary to add to our already open source archives. In watching these trends unfold in the young Jewish adult population, we are also learning something about how quickly our specific cultural norms are evolving – or devolving – (depending on your take) as a result of emerging social tools.

The critical question three years ago for a Jewish organization desiring to work with young adults was “do you have a presence on Facebook?” Nowadays Facebook is a neighborhood in a city of social networks. To understand behaviors, we need to look not only at specific patterns in social networking, but at a multitude of social networks and applications that are layered on top of those networks. How many social networks do people join one day and leave the next? What kind of half-life does each social network have? What creates primacy in social networks? Are there groups of people who stick to one network and groups who like to juggle networks? Are people attracted to different social networks on their phones than on their laptops? Should we treat the sharing of text, photography, and video as separate cultural behaviors? Are close friends using different platforms than distant friends? Who is “following” who? What are the ethics of anonymous interactions? Where is the boundary between real and virtual communication? The questions that emerge when one looks at screen behavior are like an outbreak of pop-up windows – they need to be addressed one at a time and when you click on one it may actually open up another window.

Birthright Israel NEXT has a unique set of communications issues. We have an enormous database of over 100,000 constituents which is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, we have tremendous potential to reach an audience not reached by other organizations. On the other hand, we have an enormous task in communicating to a constituent base that ignores emails no matter how enticing the subject header.

Given that we as an organization have to prove success with a skeletal local staff and peer-driven informal educational programming -- our ongoing efforts on the communication front are crucial. It is this latter area of focus that brought TXT Study into being.

How did we arrive at investing in market research on social networking? We did a competitive RFP process to find partners and narrowed down our scope. Rather than keep a lock and key on what we find, we are using this opportunity to open up a conversation with others who work in the field of informal Jewish education. Our actions here are partially altruistic – we do want all boats to rise, and partially selfish -- we sense that we will learn a great deal from the reactions of others to this set of questions.

Our colleagues at Attention PR worked to gather the market research. The research is being conducted by two different firms that analyze over twenty-five social networks. They are Rapleaf, based in San Francisco and Radian 6, a Canadian firm. These are essentially firms that know how to rake social networks and analyze what they find. We are also thrilled to have Tobin Belzer, Ph.D. a research associate at the Center for Religion and Public life at the University of Southern California to provide some context to this project. Dr. Belzer will be help us to understand how these online social patterns fit into overall social patterns that sociologists have observed in researching young Jewish adults.

Our goal is two-fold. To improve our own abilities in reaching out to Taglit-Birthright Israel alumni and their peers, and to assist other organizations in their efforts to engage young adults in the places where they are already clicking.

It is our plan to continue to host these online seminars when we have new knowledge to share and to draw some conclusions via reports on these seminars. And if folks are clamoring for a real live, in the same room, breaking bread together moment then maybe we’ll do that too. Welcome to TXT Study.

Rabbi Daniel Brenner