Ori Schwarz

Bar Ilan University | BIU ·  Department of Sociology and Anthropology

The digital revolution has not only transformed multiple aspects of social life – it also shakes sociological theory, transforming the most basic assumptions that have underlain it. In this timely book, Ori Schwarz explores the main challenges digitalization poses to different strands of sociological theory and offers paths to adapt them to new soc...

The article explores Facebook governance—its mechanisms, motivations and sources of power—while identifying wider patterns and logics that apply to other internet corporations. I suggest that (1) When digital capitalism turns mundane human interactions into biopolitical production, corporations gain interest in governing these interactions to maxim...

Broad social identities like ethnicity and class are not only resources mobilized by social movements. Relational analysis reveals they can also be barriers constraining movement growth, as symbolic affinities with particular social identities may construct movement membership and support as incompatible with other identities. This mechanism may re...

Viewing both ethics and aesthetics as reflections of the social, cultural sociologists fail to thoroughly account for the complex interrelations between these realms. This article explores this relationship through a study of ‘farterism’, a discursive category that emerged in Israel during the 1990s and is used to denounce vain pretence. Not only d...

The article explores different ways to conceptualize the relationship between choice and culture. These two notions are often constructed as opposites: while sociologies of modernization (such as Giddens') portray a shift from cultural traditions to culturally disembedded choice, dispositional sociologies (such as Bourdieu's) uncover cultural deter...

During the 2014 Gaza war Facebook became a central arena for moral/political boundary work for Israeli users, resulting in unusually high rates of politically motivated tie dissolution. Cultural criteria were thus applied to restructure and symbolically cleanse social networks. We analyze Facebook’s visibility-structures, interview data and public...

Critical sociology suggests that taste judgments are not independent of the social, as actors use them to claim social value. This article demonstrates that this critical perspective has gained currency among laypersons, transforming everyday struggles over cultural evaluation. I discuss the new discursive category ‘farterism’, which emerged in Isr...

While authenticity has become a main axiological principle in late-modernity, a desired good and token of worth, studies from different countries indicate inequality in access to authenticity: middle-class ethnic minorities often face difficulties being recognized as authentic and experiencing themselves as such. This phenomenon is discussed below...

Based on focus groups and interviews with student renters in an Israeli slum, the article explores the contributions of differences in sonic styles and sensibilities to boundary work, social categorization, and evaluation. Alongside visual cues such as broken windows, bad neighborhoods are characterized by sonic cues, such as shouts from windows. S...

Sounds and sonic norms and regimes characterize both spaces/territories and individual bodies. This article explores the meanings of and reactions to Arab sounds in Israel – political struggles over muezzins, stereotypical representations of Israeli Palestinians as loud, and so on – in order to offer general insights into the role of the sonic (bot...

In contemporary societies, the language of authenticity has become central to the organization of work, manners, social ties, and most interestingly: social and moral evaluation. The paper explores how the ethic of authenticity informs symbolic economies of worth in Israel and the US. These new symbolic economies differ from Bourdieu's: mastery of...

The new' sociology of culture has provided us with valuable insights regarding the performative, corporeal, and unpredictable dimensions of art tasting, which the old', critical sociology of art failed to recognize. But how can we profit from these insights without committing the sin of the denial of the social (and social structures in particular)...

Tourist experiences are not merely visual but multisensory. When considering the sounds of nature, tourists often have conflicting preferences regarding the appropriate and desired soundscape. The article explores these preferences and how they relate to different ways of engagement with nature, each having its own historical roots, agents and soci...

How do late-modern people morally evaluate behavior in emotionally-laden situations? To answer this question, a cultural sociology of morality should explore both cultural contents and social contexts that inform their employment. The article studies how Israelis ethically evaluate loud mourning performances. In line with ‘moral polytheist’ reperto...

How does digitization reshape people's engagement with their past? As ever more moments and interactions are objectified as digital data (photos, e-mail, instant messaging protocols) stored in digital archives that are constantly available and used intensively as memory aids, people's engagement with their past is increasingly mediated by databases...

The article discusses a set of emerging techno-social practices that transform interpersonal interactions into acts of production of valuable, durable objects such as SNS-posts and videos. These practices rely on (and enhance) a new attentiveness towards the world (including social interactions, communication and quasi-autotelic activities) as Best...

The article investigates the shift of much interpersonal communication from phone or face-to-face interaction to instant messaging, especially among teenagers. This objectification of conversation enabled changes in myriad social practices, as well as in regimes of intimacy and truth: new, invisible audiences are introduced to hitherto intimate sit...

• Many sexual encounters are nowadays photographed by the participants. The article examines the photographed sex in the historical contexts of the visualization of sexuality, pleasure and desire, and the new norms of photographed self-documentation. Based on research conducted in Israel, I show that photographed sex produces not only new sorts of...

Digital cameras are now intensively used by ordinary participants of Jewish mass rituals. The article explores how their introduction led to religious change and re-definition of sacred time/space. I first outline the development of new religious technologies-of-self, in which videos of mass rituals are used for mediated interaction with the sacred...

The paper examines the new roles assumed by digital photography in romantic relationships. Research conducted in Israel demonstrates that the ubiquitous digital and phone cameras have been incorporated into multiple scripts of courtship, reconciliation, eroticism, and relationship formation. Photography often functions as a non-verbal method of exp...

Mobile photography and the emergence of lay self-portraiture are often interpreted as emancipatory processes of increasing agency and self-revelation. This article challenges this view by examining photos published in online albums and social network sites (SNSs). Bourdieuvian field analysis is utilized to reveal the local forms of capital that cha...

The nostalgic consumption of images, which only a few years ago was practised mainly by adults, has lately become prevalent among Israeli teenage girls. Girls often describe themselves as ‘nostalgic’ and nostalgia has become a desired emotion. Unlike the nostalgia of former generations, this nostalgia is cumulative and not necessarily based on a st...