ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the decision to surf the internet via Rimon, an internet service provider (ISP) that offers varying degrees of filtering for its religiously observant subscribers. It concerns media practice in everyday life are reflected on by focusing on a group whose negotiations with technology are both explicitly ambivalent and ideologically informed: National Religious families in Israel and their negotiation with the internet in the home. Rimon can be understood as an expression of media ambivalence. National Religious Jews who are constantly trying to negotiate between the enclave nature of the Haredi community and the pluralistic, "immoral", boundary less world of the Israeli secular community, view filtered internet as a compromise between these two extremes. Adopting and using digital media in this context becomes a symbolic act of identity, a means of being and remaining a Nationally Religious Jew in contemporary Israel.