Making a complex story simple: The exclusion of social media from life stories

Abstract

This article offers an account of the absence of media in general, and social media in particular, from a set of life story narratives. After conducting both unstructured life story interviews and semi-structured interviews with 15 Muslim Palestinian women in Israel, we analyzed the stories presented in each interview and the explanations given by interviewees for excluding items about (social) media from their life stories. Interviewees resolved what they saw as a contradiction—referencing “shallow” media in their “serious” stories about their identity—by sifting out items that could threaten the proper flow of such stories, as they perceived it, despite acknowledging their centrality in identity change. Cultural context and individuals’ beliefs are presented as preventing events related to media, especially new media, from being related in life stories. Moreover, our findings show the significance of life story interviews in interviewees’ identity development. It is argued that identities of both interviewer and interviewee play a role in constructing the story told. Life-storying occurs in a complex context that involves introspection, which itself affects the process of the storyteller’s identity formation. This study contributes to debates about the place of media in everyday life, as well as to our understanding of the relationship between identity and life-storying. The argument proposed here—that the absence of media from life stories might be due to conscious considerations rooted in the cultural specificity of those stories—is one that can be tested in further research.

Media are central in shaping our collective and personal memories (Bourdon, 2003; Neiger et al., 2011). Playing a role in shaping our life events as platforms on which to share updates and changes (Haimson et al., 2021), media may be mentioned in, or excluded from, life story narratives. On one hand, if we live our lives in and through media (Deuze, 2012a), then presumably media will fade into the background and will not be major protagonists in life stories; on the other hand, people clearly have different perceptions and beliefs regarding media and their proper use in different social situations (see, for instance, Gershon, 2010a), suggesting that they are less taken for granted than media life theory might imply.

This study investigates the place of (social) media in “life-storying” (Bourdon, 2011) and examines not only the text, or the story, provided by research participants, but also the very act of telling these stories, and delves into the dilemmas and motivations behind the narrative that is ultimately produced. Specifically, we ask: How do social media users refer to their social media use in their life stories? What media-related events or details do they withhold from their life story? This in turn leads us to ask: How do they account for their decisions, and what does this teach us about life stories, social media, and identity?

The first author carried out life story interviews followed by semi-structured interviews with a sample of 15 Muslim Palestinian women living in Israel. This article is motivated by the observation that stories about media use, and specifically social media, were strikingly absent from the interviewees’ life stories, even though they had a great deal to say about them in the semi-structured interviews, and even though they knew ahead of time that the study deals with social media. This leads us to explore the different possible explanations of our findings by theories dealing with media and narratives, given that interviewees attributed a significant role to social media in their identity formation process.

At first glance, it would seem that details are excluded from the interviewee’s life story partly because of the story teller’s beliefs, thoughts, and cultural context. A source of complexity, however, is their use of technological tools that they perceive as “shallow” and “fake” for the purposes of building a “good” and “serious” identity. We argue that users of social media are aware of their presence and role in their identity formation process, yet consciously choose to exclude social media from their life story. We argue that the interviewees’ identity and their life story are related in a circular relationship: the story presents an ideal self of the interviewee while the very act of storying helps shape their identity perception. The interviewees’ cultural, political, and religious background is an aspect of their life-storying. Living in a changing yet traditional, conservative society (Sabbagh-Khoury and Rouhana, 2018) that perceives some mainstream media as hostile (Tsfati, 2007), religious women may not refer to media that are perceived as shallow to explain a serious topic, such as their identity formation.

In the following, we discuss the presentation of identity in life story interviews. We then present the qualitative methodologies employed in this study. Following a presentation of our main findings, we discuss their implications.

Background

Identity and life stories

Stories are told by people who experience, grow, and live within different social contexts, holding different norms. As such, stories are social phenomena (McAdams, 1996) that exist in a sociocultural context that plays a role in the way people perceive and talk about their life events (Bauer et al., 2008; McAdams, 2011). Moreover, the communities people come from, and the master narratives of their cultures, are imported into the personal stories they tell, the perspectives they present (Hammack, 2008; McAdams, 2013) and the stories they hide (Lomsky-Feder, 2004). In fact, people tell different stories when asked to tell their life story, depending on the audience and context of the storytelling (Mishler, 2004).

The life story interview is a method where a story is told to help the researcher understand how the interviewee’s present situation is related to past events (Tagg, 1985) and how the interviewee deals with them (Meyers and Davidson, 2017). Life stories help their tellers form a personal, biographical identity (McAdams et al., 2001) and, through the very act of storytelling, contribute to shaping their identity (Rosenwald and Ochenberg, 1992). One instrument of storytelling is the interview: whether open, semi-structured, or structured, it requires that the interviewee present a narrative (Mishler, 1986). Interviewees provide stories through which they make sense of life events (Bruner, 1990); indeed, it is often the “impossibility of logically explaining events [that] compels us to tell stories” (Miller, 1990: 72). People tell one of countless versions of their life stories, which necessarily entails withholding certain occasions and episodes from their past (Bruner and Weisser, 1991), so as to construct an ideal narrative related to the teller’s identity and sense of self (McAdams, 1996). Moreover, these stories are told in a social context, part of which is the very interaction between researcher and participant (Wallace, 1994). Given this, the term “life story” can be misleading, since there is no one way of telling one’s life story (Bruner and Weisser, 1991). Bourdon (2011) offers the term “life-storying,” which we use in this article, arguing that the focus should not be on the textual output of the narrative (the “life story”) but rather on the very activity of constructing the story. This article offers a glance into the decision-making processes and logics during the act of life-storying, and explores the reasons for excluding some events and aspects from the life-storying product, the life story.

Theories such as McAdams’ (2003) life story theory of identity, and Ricoeur’s (1991) narrative identity theory, stress the role of life-storying in reflecting the narrator’s identity and sense of self. They both argue that identity can take the form of a life story, a narrative of the self, where we choose to add or withhold parts that help to build the identity we choose. Using life story interviews as a method where the interviewee is free to choose the stories told can contribute to our understanding of the place of media in our identity and identity formation process, and help us comprehend if and how life stories represent the interviewees’ identity and sense of self.

Media use and life storytelling

Research refers to the ways people’s collective and individual memory is formed regarding major national and international events with the help of media (Cohen et al., 2018), and numerous studies have explored the place of social media in our day-to-day lives (Abeele et al., 2018; Horst, 2012; Silverstone, 2013). Scholars, such as Strelitz (2008), suggest that life story interviews are a suitable method with which to investigate the relationship between media use and identity formation. In this article we are concerned with the importance attributed by interviewees to the former vis-a-vis the latter.

Social media and the porous relationship between online and offline spheres add a new aspect to the stories people tell about themselves, and might even challenge the rules of storytelling when this was confined to offline occurrences, or when stories are told using social media (see Humphrey, 2019). Social media appears to be an area where events happen and become stories told on and offline. In this study we looked for such stories as part of a life narrative that is told within an unstructured form of interviews.

Numerous studies show that social media play a central role in identity formation (e.g. boyd, 2007; Tufekci, 2008). Accordingly, we would expect them to be mentioned in life stories. We would expect that interviewees will recall and talk about content they posted or read, the ties they gained or lost, and the information they gathered on social media, during a critical period of their lives. Yet, the theory of media life—on which more below—would lead us to expect that media will not appear in the story, unless users are specifically asked to talk about them.

Social media and (religious) identity

The mediatization of religion has been widely investigated in relation to the role of social media in shaping and changing religious identity and practice (Lövheim and Hjarvard, 2019). Just as social media offer religious information and texts for consumption and sharing, they also enable their users to produce texts and interact with other users as they shape and practice their religious identity online (Becker, 2011; Feltmate, 2010; Lundby, 2011; Teusner, 2010). Moreover, online religious opinion leaders play a role in shaping other users’ religious identity (Karakoca and Sari, 2021), just as religious authorities find themselves (re)negotiating their role in a changing world (Campbell, 2020; Tsourlaki, 2020). At the same time, users can use social media to construct and present their religious identity (Kavakci and Kraeplin, 2017).

Women’s religious identity and social media use have been studied broadly (Lövheim, 2013). In Muslim Arab society, women’s religious identity, with its clear visual marker, the hijab, is presented while negotiating with both offline and online environments (Hurley, 2021). Whether it is by using social media as an alternative space to form their religious identity by learning about and negotiating with religion (Geaves and Gabriel, 2013), by connecting with others who have a similar identity (Pennington, 2018b), or by actively resisting Islamophobic content online (Pennington, 2018a), Muslims, especially women, use social media to present their religious identity. The current study addresses not only the research population’s (Muslim Palestinian women in Israel) media use as understudied, but also the need to distinguish religious Muslim women and their religious identity from the broader category of Muslims when addressing media use. Abu-Lughod (2002) called for cultural sensitivity when studying Muslim and Arab women, a call answered in research into religious Muslim women in non-Muslim countries (see esp. Evolvi, 2017, 2018, 2019; Piela, 2011a, 2011b, 2021). Research of Muslim women’s social media use paints a picture of a marginalized group trying to express its religious identity (Peterson, 2020; Piela, 2021; Šisler, 2008). The current study discusses the way a marginalized group, suffering from triple oppression (as women, as Muslims, and as Palestinians), negotiates media through their life stories.

Media in everyday life

The place of media in stories people tell about themselves has been postulated by several theories. Two different conceptions that help predict whether and how interviewees talk about their media use are Deuze’s media life and Gershon’s media ideologies. In Media Life, Mark Deuze (2012a) deploys the metaphor of the fish’s obliviousness of the water in which it lives to argue that media are so integral to our everyday lives that they disappear from our awareness. The concept of media life posits that people experience life through media. This implies a critique of traditional media research perspectives, which are seen as reproducing dichotomies, such as between society and media, regarding the production, use, and content of media (Deuze, 2011). Media life leads us to predict that interviewees will not talk about media. As Deuze puts it, “As almost every waking moment is either directly or indirectly spent with media, when asked about it, people tend to forget most of that media use” (Deuze, 2012a: 366).

A different view of people’s motivations to tell, or not, stories of media use is offered in Gershon (2010a) argument that people have different “media ideologies” that play a role in the way that they behave and speak about media. She defines “media ideologies” as “people’s beliefs, attitudes, and strategies about the media they use [and] the assumptions that people hold about how a medium accomplishes communicative tasks” (Gershon, 2010a: 391). These ideologies include both the communicative possibilities and the material limitations of media (Gershon, 2010b), and so behavior and decisions can be based on one’s perception of media. Media ideologies reveal people’s perceptions of the possibilities and affordances of the media such as intimacy (Gershon, 2010c) and authenticity (Eisenlohr, 2010). Put differently, if identity cannot be disentangled from media (boyd, 2006), then presumably media will be central to the stories people tell about themselves.

In this study, we focus on stories about changing religious identities, focusing on the presence or absence of references to the role of media, and social media in particular, in these stories. Indeed, an explicit assumption here is that that which is excluded from people’s accounts is sometimes no less significant than that which is spoken of (Lomsky-Feder, 2004; Presser, 2013). According to media life theory, we would expect that unstructured narratives would not contain details about media, especially technology infrastructure, out of unawareness of their presence, because these are invisible to the users (Deuze, 2012a). In this study we refer to the contexts, mainly socio-political, within which the interviewees’ are placed, as they are an unignorable aspect of people’s media use and perceptions (see van Dijck and Poell, 2015).

Method

The research population: Muslim Palestinian women in Israel

This study samples Muslim Palestinian women in Israel who were social media users at the time they were going through a process of becoming more religious. This change was expressed mainly by wearing the hijab, and at times the niqab (face covering), and a strengthening of their faith. We chose this particular population for its complex identity and the opportunity to learn about media use in identity formation since all our participants faced discouragement of their increasing religiosity from their offline environment. Because of this, these women used social media as an alternative sphere in which to develop their identity (Agbarya and John, 2021).

The emergence of the Internet as a technology that enables young people to build and maintain an identity away from parental oversight, provided young Muslim women in Israel with an opportunity to express their self with greater freedom. Indeed, the role of new technologies in challenging Arab parents’ authority and enabling young women to develop an independent identity has been observed, for example, in Hijazi-Omari and Ribak (2008) study, which pointed to the role of secretly owned cellular phones in maintaining forbidden romantic relationships among Muslim teenagers in Israel. Yet a sense of social and political surveillance accompanies women’s social media use (de Vries and Majlaton, 2021).

We would expect religious Muslim women in Israel to perceive western social media as hostile. This is because they belong to Arab society in Israel, which perceives Israeli mainstream media as hostile (Tsfati, 2007), and where they are treated with suspicion and viewed as responsible for violent acts (Kampf, 2021). This population is confronted with similar political oppression on social media, especially in times of clashes, where they experience being a part of a weakened group on a supposedly equalizing platform (John and Agbarya, 2021). On top of that, the state uses social media to re-narrate their collective memory and identity (see Cohen, 2022). Moreover, the participants are Muslims in the western world who need to present a positive image of themselves in a hostile and alienating social media environment (see Bahfen, 2018).

Life stories and semi-structured interviews

To better understand the role of media in life-storying, the first author carried out life story interviews and, at a later date, semi-structured interviews, with Muslim Palestinian women living in Israel, aged 19–37 years, who had lately experienced an increase of religiosity, and who use social media. All interviews took place in locations that the interviewees chose, mostly their houses, and were recorded and transcribed. The life story interviews lasted an average of 216 minutes, while the semi-structured interviews lasted for an average of 75 minutes. Due to the potential sensitivity of some of the details mentioned in the interviews, neither the recordings nor transcripts included the participants’ names. For the sake of this article, pseudonyms are used.

Life story interviews can be held in a number of ways, from open interviews with almost no questions, to structured interviews with questions about different periods of the interviewee’s life (Atkinson, 1998). The research for which these interviews were conducted deals with the interviewees’ identity formation and social behaviors, thus, a first, open interview is the best way to understand how interviewees perceive the importance of events, changes and social ties in their life. The first type of interviews were held as narrative interviews, a method that brings up major events in the interviewee’s life with minimal engagement on the part of the interviewer (Jovchelovitch and Bauer, 2000). These are open life story interviews that aim to glean the interviewees’ own view of their life events and story. The second type of interviews were semi-structured so as to focus on and develop the data collected in the narrative interviews about religious identity change and tie management. Based on the narrative from the first interviews, the semi-structured interviews sought to clarify if there were details about media use that had not been mentioned. This was achieved by asking direct questions about media use, such as: What role did social media play in your becoming more religious? Were your online ties affected by the identity change?

For the sake of this study, the first author, a religious Muslim Palestinian woman herself, contacted religious Muslim Palestinian women and introduced the study as part of her PhD research at a leading university in Israel. We used snowball sampling, when the first participant was an acquaintance to the interviewer, and helped detect other interviewees. The second sampling method was using a Facebook post on a Facebook group that targets religious Muslim women. Developing a sort of familiarity with the majority of the interviewees was necessary ahead of holding the interviews, given that some were suspicious toward research being carried out under the auspices of a leading Israeli university. The interviewer conducted pre-interview conversations with each interviewee to persuade them to participate in the research. All interviews took place in 2019.

Some potential interviewees refused to participate in a study conducted in an Israeli university, and some hesitation and suspicion were noticed, mainly by interviewees who did not study at Israeli academic institutions. Having said that, it is also important to note that during the conversations held before the interview, some interviewees said that they perceived participating in the study as a way to “get their voice heard in the West.”

To analyze the data, we used a simple comparison using a table of two columns containing the main narrative about religious identity change in every interview. This helped us find the similarities and differences between the stories and afforded a holistic perspective of the period of identity change. The analysis relied on the participants’ answers and stories using the hermeneutics of faith, as suggested by Josselson (2004). That is, the researcher depends on the participants’ claims as the best description of their subjective experiences.

MAXQDA software for qualitative analysis was used, which enables both micro and macro views of the data. Using the software, we flagged stories and items that were relevant to the research topic. After the items were detected we were able to thematically analyze them using a macro view of all interviews and deriving main themes and insights to answer the research question. Stories about religious identity change were marked in all interviews and stories told in the life story and the semi-structured interviews about similar periods of the interviewee’s life were compared. For instance, a story about breaking up with a romantic partner for religious reasons at the age of 16 that was mentioned in the life story interview would be compared with a story about blocking that romantic partner and other friends who had tried to convince the interviewee to keep the relationship going. Such stories were marked at the micro level of analysis. At the macro level, we tried to group similar stories under broad categories, following the process of open and then axial coding described in Corbin and Strauss (2014; see esp. Part 2). This resulted in three themes: the story of increasing religiosity; explanations of the absence of media stories; and participating in a life story interview.

Findings

The key finding from the two sets of interviews is that in the life story interviews, media were hardly mentioned at all, while in the semi-structured interviews, which included questions about (social) media, the interviewees had a great deal to say about the role of SNSs in their process of identity change. To present this finding, we shall present three themes in interviewees’ life-storying regarding social media use: first, stories about increasing religiosity in the life story interviews and the place of social media, which were not mentioned in these stories; second, the explanations provided by the interviewees; and, finally, the place of the interviews in the interviewees’ identity formation.

The story of increasing religiosity

Given that the interviewees knew that the research in which they were participating dealt with social media, and given that they were all social media users, the absence from the life story interviews of stories about media use in relation to the process of identity change was most striking. Indeed, only three out of 15 interviewees mentioned media use and consumption in their life story interviews, and even then only in passing. Their change in identity was mainly presented in terms of an inner spiritual process, by which the interviewees raised questions and doubts about their identity. For example, in her life story interview, Ashwaq (26, student) described the way she started to question her identity as follows:

I realized that I have to run, to get out, I don’t know where, I have to . . . go out and look for myself, to find myself in a place where I really can ask who I am and find answers. I told you that my dream was to study law at the Hebrew [University], and nowhere else. Today I can say that I was so stubborn because of the fear of being in a place where I would have to stay at home and I didn’t want to stay at home, I wanted to get out.

Ashwaq then went on to tell a narrative about an inner change that involved breaking social ties with family and friends, but she makes no mention of new ties that she built in support of her identity change. However, there were other events, no less important, taking place online during this period. When asked in the semi-structured interview, “What about social media?,” Ashwaq talked for 18 minutes about her social media use during the process of her religious identity change, referring to Facebook as “my sanctuary.” Indeed, she consciously used social media to garner the emotional and moral support she needed. Ashwaq talks about building online ties as a part of her “plan” to become more religious, and perceives these ties and the encouragement they provide as highly important to maintaining her “level of religiosity.” All of this, we reiterate, despite the fact that she told no stories about her media use in her life story, or even referred to media use at all.

There were very few examples of participants who did mention media use, and those who did tried to blur it. Nawras (23, blogger) spoke about a romantic relationship with a young man that ended once she became more religious. This is how she described the break up:

Then the guy I had a relationship with started telling me . . . What? Someone brainwashed you? And he started saying, if you love me, take off the hijab. If you love me, don’t do this to yourself. So I told him, thank goodness, I didn’t know how to get out of this relationship. I told him I am not the kind of person who likes such commitments [to other people], so I don’t want this relationship. I told him, great! Allah freed me from you. A month later he was still sending me messages, take this thing off, what have you done to yourself? And I kept telling him, this is none of your business.

During the life story interview, Nawras did not clarify the nature of this relationship: it was unclear whether it was carried out mainly face-to-face, or whether it was an online relationship where they mainly communicated via social media. In the semi-structured interview, Nawras made it clear that the relationship was an online one, and that she had met him face-to-face only once. Moreover, in the above quote she describes sending messages, yet without specifying what medium they were sent through. In fact, Nawras tells a story of breaking an online relationship with almost no reference to social media at all.

Overall, comparing the life story and the semi-structured stories reveals that the absence of media-related stories is not because of the latter’s marginal role in the process of religious identity formation. Some interviewees even told stories about social media use without mentioning social media, making it seem like they happened offline. Nearly all of the interviewees spoke of the resistance that their increased religiosity aroused among offline close family, friends or colleagues. The narratives were also similar in that the narrators saw themselves as potential role models for young women who might be thinking about becoming more religious. For example, Shimaa (25, stay-at-home mom) claimed that she is “very careful about what I post and the image it creates for religious girls. Non-religious people might be reading and I want to help their religiosity, not damage it.” The interviewees declared that they use social media as a tool in the service of their identity change, and that of others. However, they refrained from introducing this role of social media into their own life-story narratives.

Explanations of the absence of media stories

At the very end of their semi-structured interviews, participants were asked how they accounted for the fact that they had not mentioned media use in their life story interview, if indeed they could. In their answers, the interviewees expressed a perception of social media as shallow, and therefore not worthy of inclusion in their life stories. Ashwaq explained why she had not talked about social media in her life story interview as follows:

First of all because you asked me to tell . . . to focus on a life story, so I focused on what actually happened. To be honest, I felt that it’s built in, it is very clear that it [social media] is used to help us get through things, you see? It feels so obvious that I would post something about what I feel or experience. Maybe because I focused more on the process than the tool. I think I wasn’t aware of how much it [social media use] affects me, but it looks like it does.

Ashwaq’s answer offers insights into life storytelling and social media. First, she defines a life story as a narrative of “actual” events. It would seem that her perception of social media as “less realistic” causes her to view them as not important enough to warrant inclusion in her life story. Her answer shows an awareness of her choice to exclude social media use from her life story.

Similarly, when asked why she had not mentioned social media in the life story interview, Layla (22, computer engineer) immediately responded: “because I don’t trust this thing [social media], because I don’t like it.” This answer can be read in a number of ways: Layla may want to present herself in what she considers a positive way; she may perceive the role of social media in major life events as minor; or she may be taking social media for granted. Again, similarly to Ashwaq, Layla made a conscious decision to exclude media use and stories related to it from her life story.

Like other interviewees, Layla did refer to social media as an effective tool in forming her religious identity. Although she claimed that social media constitute a dishonest, shallow and fake sphere that is not important enough to be mentioned as part of her life story, she used social media not only as a data source and an alternative social sphere, but also as a tool of persuasion. For example, Layla mentioned a friend who had experienced a “religious identity crisis”:

She started digging . . . is hijab an obligation? I asked her to talk with Ahmad [a religious person she used to contact to discuss and ask about religious issues], and she reached the point where she was like, OK, I’ll talk to him.

Layla wanted her friend to interact online with Ahmad so that she would maintain her high level of religiosity. She also displayed trust in social media when explaining the reason for preserving online ties with people who are not religious. As she put it, an online connection with her might “be the last tie that keeps them connected to religion.” Layla clearly believes in the efficacy of social media, which raises questions about their absence from her life story interview. It is not because social media did not play a central role in her identity change, nor because she did not believe that social media can be an effective tool in the development and maintenance of a new religious identity. Both Ashwaq and Layla appear to have made a conscious decision to exclude social media from their telling of their life stories.

Participating in a life story interview

It is hard to ignore the link between the participants’ identities, both religious and political, and the very process of participating in this study. This can be seen from the first contact with the interviewer, when some potential participants refused to participate in a study conducted within the Israeli academy, and some asked to participate in order “to get Muslim voices heard in western academia” (Ashwaa). It continued through the life stories they told, where they focused on inner, spiritual, and personal events, and introduced some criteria for the inclusion of stories in a life story narrative. It ended with some of the interviewees contacting the interviewer after the interviews.

We suggest that the life-storying act was itself related to the interviewees’ identity formation processes. They built an acceptable story of who they are and invested their thoughts, memories, and feelings into the story. A number of interviewees reported that the act of storying was a significant event in their ongoing process of identity formation. Moreover, some interviewees contacted the interviewer after the interview, at times more than a year later, to update her about their identity development. For instance, Manal called the interviewer about 2 years after the interview asking to “continue her life story.” The call ended with her saying that she “feels like you [the interviewer] should know about this, it is the new me now. I think that telling you the rest of my life story helps me understand who I am and makes order in my thoughts.” Both the life story and semi-structured interviews were used to negotiate meanings and the significance of the interviewee’s life, and the interviewee tried to translate her experience into mainstream academic language and terminology (Devault, 1990).

Discussion

As some theories would predict, our interviewees told the story of their identity development (McAdams, 2003) by building a narrative out of the complicated reality they have experienced and simplifying it into a story (Miller, 1990). In doing so, they excluded certain elements and events (Goffman, 1959); in particular, they hardly mentioned their (social) media use and online events at all (Deuze, 2012a). However, during semi-structured interviews with the same interviewees we found that they actually had a great deal to say about their use of social media in their identity change and self-presentation. They explained not mentioning media in their life stories by talking about their beliefs about the media and the narratives at which stories about media fit (Gershon, 2010a). Previous literature has shown that people perceive new and social media as playing different roles in, and as being suitable to, particular stages of life, meaning that the place they give to media in their life changes (Brubaker et al., 2016). Our interviewees introduced a version of their life stories in which, they believe, media do not belong. This shows that the act of life-storying, including some decisions made while telling one’s life story, is strongly related to the teller’s current identity. In the current case, the interviewees’ identity as religious Muslim women and as Palestinians living in Israel can help in understanding their attitude toward media. While some religious Muslims in non-Muslim countries use social media to form and present their religious identity (Evolvi, 2018; Peterson, 2020; Premazzi and Ricucci, 2015), they nonetheless experience social media as a hostile environment (Eckert et al., 2021; Khamis, 2021). Beyond being Muslims in non-Muslim country, the perception of hostile media among Palestinians in Israel is also related to their political position (Tsfati, 2007). Given that negative attitudes to media, as well as media resistance, is present in other religious groups (Livio and Tenenboim Weinblatt, 2007; Neriya-Ben Shahar, 2017; Ribak and Rosenthal, 2015), further research into media in different religious groups’ life-storying is needed.

As for the post-interview follow-up conversations, these data can be used to learn about the participants’ identity development. Adding to existing literature that used follow-up interviews as a method to study identity (see Josselson, 1998), in the current case the interviewees voluntarily supplied their post-interview stories. We show that the life story interview by itself was an event that played a role in developing the interviewee’s identity via the opportunity to organize the story they tell about their self, while deciding which items are the best to fit in a story told about their new social and religious identity. The fact that a number of interviewees contacted the interviewer after the interview can also be understood as their viewing the life story interview as a social interaction that starts a social tie. This positions the life story interview as a unique kind of storytelling. As Linde (1993) has argued, “in the case of the life story, interview data can be used because the life story, as a major means of self-presentation, occurs naturally in a wide variety of different contexts (including interviews) and is therefore quite robust” (p. 61). The interviewees treated their relationship with the interviewer as a social tie, rather than as an acquaintance that ended with the interview (Atkinson, 1998). Moreover, they used the interview, and the post-interview conversations, to create a coherent identity.

Conclusion

This study provides two main insights: an empirical observation about the media ideologies held by religious Muslim Palestinian women living in Israel, and a methodological conclusion in which life story interviews are seen not only as a kind of self-presentation but also as a part of the interviewees’ identity formation.

Conducting a second, semi-structured interview with each participant highlighted for us this tendency of telling “offline stories” while perceiving offline events as components of the self that interviewees were more willing to present. This correlates with Gershon’s notion of “media ideologies” (Gershon, 2010a). In our case, participants’ media ideologies were conveyed through silence—at least in the life story interviews. While this silence could have looked like the interviewees taking social media so much for granted that there was nothing to say about them, the semi-structured interviews showed this not to be the case. Talking about their media use alongside offline experiences may have produced a dissonant life story, leading interviewees to exclude from their narratives stories of online tie management and spiritual, religious processes that took place online, even though it was clear from the semi-structured interviews that they saw them as central to their identity formation. This could be explained by the cultural codes and media ideologies shaping talk of media use in life stories (Gordon et al., 2017). Moreover, the religious identity of the interviewees can by itself be an explanation of this exclusion of media from life stories. It could be argued that the materiality of media, the use of devices and technological features, was perceived as weakening the spiritual aspects of the life story (see Engelke, 2007).

Interviewees saw things like their identity, self and being asked to tell their life story as “serious,” “real,” and “deep,” while perceiving social media as “shallow” and “fake.” This correlates with McAdams’ (1996) claim that interviewees present an ideal self when telling their life stories. However, because social media nonetheless played an important role in shaping their identity, the participants found themselves needing to resolve this tension to tell a coherent life story. They did this by excluding stories about social media use, and building a story that fit cultural beliefs about the importance (or lack thereof) of social media, while attributing to them the appropriate weight they had in the change they experienced. Using an open life story interview enables us to better understand the importance of media perception and media ideologies in telling one’s life story, and the ways people talk about their life events and identity changing process. It is of course possible that the identity of the interviewer, as well as the institute in which this study was conducted, were related to the narrative built to present religious Muslim women to the western academic society (see Agbarya, 2023).

Social media involve not only the transfer of information, but also social ties, dilemmas, roles, rules and identities, which are formed in keeping with online social codes and believed by users to be separate (at least to some degree) from offline events. This enables us to see the interviewees as holding in their minds two distinct spheres, with different criteria for what they consider appropriate to talk about when telling their life story. That is, they have certain beliefs about what belongs to, and what should be excluded from, the life story. Also, the interviewees’ identity is inseparable from their participation and life-storying. We can see that the act of storying was a significant event in the interviewees’ continuous process of identity formation, based on both previous literature and the interviewee’s reports.

Religious identity, as well as socio-political and cultural context, appears to be related to the act of life-storying and the perception of some stories as suitable to be told. While in this study, decisions about what to exclude are understandable in relation to the specific research population, we suggest that having to make these decisions is not unique to our participants. Further research with different populations could explore this.