This paper investigates mobile phone use as a medium of inter-generational communication. Research on teenage mobile phone use has tended to focus on its peer group functionality. In this paper, the mobile phone is examined as a transitional object in parent-teen interrelationships. Specifically, drawing on ethnographic work conducted in Israel among teenagers between 2000 and 2006, the paper focuses on mobile telephones as physical objects that can connect people and mediate relationships. It is shown that, for parents and their teenage children, the mobile phone is important more for the possibility of communication and less for the text or voice conversation it actually carries. Analysis focuses also on the role of the mobile phone in enabling inter-generational distance and intimacy, attending to the complicated ways in which the mobile phone is employed by parents and their teenage children. It is argued that the analysis of mobile phone practices needs to take directly into account the specific cultural contexts of production and consumption, as culture, technology and family mutually shape one another.

In this paper, we develop the notion of media ambivalence to account for such seemingly unrelated practices as content filtering, screen-time limitation and social media rejection. We propose that as compared to resistances to dedicated communication technologies with an on/off button, resistances in a neoliberal age of ubiquitous, convergent media are temporary and local. Analyzing interviews with smartphone resisters, we discuss their critique of smartphone culture; their investment in their feature phones and their pride and unease over using them; and their sense that their resistance cannot last. Interpreting smartphone resistance as a form of media ambivalence, we suggest that in terms of scope, contemporary resistance is aimed at a single medium, platform or practice that is singled out of the convergence; that its meaning develops over time along with technological and cultural changes; and that it acquires personal, social and political significance from related uses and resistances.

This study examines parents' perceptions of the influence of a youth-targeted telenovela on their own versus other children using the framework of the third person effect. Survey data (N = 132) demonstrate that parents perceived the show to have greater impact on other children than on their own. Regression analyses show that parents who thought that the show had an influence on their own children tended to monitor their child's TV viewing. In contrast, parents concerned about the influence on other children tended to monitor and examine their child's choice of friends.This study explores how parents'perceptions of the influence of harmful media messages, and their beliefs about them, affect their parenting practices. We investigate whether parents'perceptions of media influence relate to parents'monitoring of their kids' social lives in addition to parents' involvement in their children's media consumption, which has been demonstrated in past research. We hypothesize that parents who perceive media influence on children tend to monitor and examine their child's choice of friends. We used the airing of a supposedly harmful and heavily controversial youth-targeted telenovela in Israel as the context of our current investigation. THE CONTEXT: REBELDE WAY IN ISRAELRebelde Way (translated as HaMordim meaning "the rebels" in Hebrew) is an Argentine youth-targeted soap opera that has been broadcast in Israel via cable and MASS COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY, 2005, 8(1), 3-22 Requests for reprints should be sent to Yariv Tsfati,

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