What does a country's television programming say about its deep character, beliefs, dreams, and fears? In Demon in the Box, Tasha G. Oren recounts the volatile history of Israeli television and thereby reveals the history of the nation itself.

Initially rejected as a corrupting influence on "the people of the book," television became the object of fantasies and anxieties that went to the heart of Israel's most pressing concerns: Arab-Israeli relations, immigration, and the forging of a modern Israeli culture. Television broadcasting was aimed toward external relations-the flow of messages across borders, Arab-Israeli conflict, and the shaping of public opinion worldwide-as much as it was toward internal needs and interests. Through archival research and analysis of public scandals and early programs, Oren traces Israeli television's transformation from a feared agent of decadence to a powerful national communication tool, and eventually, to a vastly popular entertainment medium.

Rhetoric about media technology tends to fall into two extreme categories: unequivocal celebration or blanket condemnation.  This is particularly true in debate over the clash of values when first world media infiltrate third world audiences.

Bringing together the best new work on contemporary media practices, technologies, and policies, the essayists in Global Currents argue that neither of these extreme views accurately represents the role of media technology today. New ways of thinking about film, television, music, and the internet demonstrate that it is not only media technologies that affect the cultures into which they are introduced—it is just as likely that the receiving culture will change the media.

Topics covered in the volume include copyright law and surveillance technology, cyber activism in the African Diaspora, transnational monopolies and local television industries, the marketing and consumption of  “global music,” “click politics” and the war on Afghanistan, the techno-politics of distance education, artificial intelligence and global legal institutions, and traveling and “squatting” in digital space. Balanced between major theoretical positions and original field research, the selections address the political and cultural meanings that surround and configure new technologies.