Ori Schwarz

On Friendship, Boobs and the Logic of the Catalogue: Online Self-Portraits as a Means for the Exchange of Capital

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 characterize those sites as fields of cultural production. Special attention is given to the enabling function of photos in the exchange between cultural, corporeal and social capital. Unlike both ‘home mode’ photos aimed for family and friends and professional photos aimed for strangers, photos in SNSs are an instrument aimed at making strangers into friends through their incorporation in a consumerist visual representation of society as a catalogue. Rather than an expression of a reflexively chosen identity, the photos produced by different actors are explained by their corresponding position in the field and composition of capital, as well as by the photos’ functionality.

Who moved my conversation? Instant messaging, intertextuality and new regimes of intimacy and truth:

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 situations for real-time consultations; intimacy, traditionally based on exclusivity in access to events and information, has to be reshaped under the new conditions as ‘network intimacy‘; formerly separate events collapse into new frames, challenging traditional temporal sequencing of sociability; conversations are imbued with performativities of different sorts; and proof and evidence are introduced into interpersonal spheres where they weren‘t common before.

The past next door: Neighbourly relations with digital memory-artefacts

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 and algorithms. The article explores how the non-narrative, paradigmatic structure of the database then remoulds memory. More specifically, it is suggested that once encounters of people with representations of the past from their personal archives are mediated by search and sorting algorithms, memories lose their status as docile objects. When memory objects can appear in unexpected places and times, their agency qua memory actants can no longer be blackboxed. Rather than relations of possession, people then have neighbourly relations with the memory objects that populate their digital environments.

Bending Forward, One Step Backward: On the Sociology of Tasting Techniques

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)? This article suggests that these insights may be incorporated into the critical sociology of art once we are ready to substitute reified tasting techniques for reified tastes as our main objects of study. Relying on works in anthropology, philosophy, history and neuroscience, I urge us to put tasting techniques at the heart of our research agenda in cultural sociology. This will enable us to simultaneously give full account of the subjective, unique art-tasting experiences which are informed by specific tasting techniques, as well as of the role the same techniques play in social reproduction and social closure.

Good Young Nostalgia: Camera phones and technologies of self among Israeli youths

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 strong dichotomous contrast between past and present. The transformation of nostalgia is closely related to developments in technology (the camera-phone and the internet) and in the possession-patterns of devices. Personal mobile phones are used by teenagers for production, archiving and consumption of documentary images on a daily basis. These images, not unrelated to those of mass media, are consumed by teenagers in order to evoke nostalgia and other emotions, as a technology of self. This trend also contributes to blur the ontic distinction between events and their representations.

Going to bed with a camera On the visualization of sexuality and the production of knowledge

• 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 pleasure, but also knowledge: about one’s self, partner, sexuality and relationship. This ‘objective’ visual knowledge is often privileged over subjective, haptic knowledge. Photography also introduces new peformativities, and encourages borrowing from media-representations of sex and rational self-improvement. •

Praying with a camera phone: Mediation and transformation in Jewish rituals

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 and for emotional, moral and spiritual management and self-disciplining. I then address the transformation of traditional rituals: seen as embodied motional and vocal performances, rituals are affected by the physical engagement with cameras, whereas photography is incorporated into ritual scripts as a ritual role.

The Sound of Stigmatization: Sonic Habitus, Sonic Styles, and Boundary Work in an Urban Slum.

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. Students understand “being ghetto” as being loud in a particular way and use loudness as a central resource in their boundary work. Loudness is read as a performative index of class and ethnicity, and the performance of middle-class studentship entails being appalled by stigmatized sonic practices and participating in their exoticization. However, the sonic is not merely yet another resource of boundary work. Paying sociological attention to senses other than vision reveals complex interactions between structures anchored in the body, structures anchored in language, and actors’ identification strategies, which may refine theorizations of the body and the senses in social theory.

The Sociology of Fancy-Schmancy: The Notion of ‘Farterism’ and Cultural Evaluation Under the Regime of Radical Suspicion

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 Israel in the 1990s to denounce vain pretence and became ubiquitous in everyday evaluation. I analyse online user-generated reviews on films and restaurants alongside broadsheet newspaper articles to explore how this category is used in different contexts by different actors, which aesthetic surface characteristics are most associated with it and why, and how farterism critique reshapes the relationship between lay judgments and established market (prices) and field/art-world (status) hierarchies. Farterism critique is often used to fend off symbolic violence, but cultural elites use it too, despite their interest. I discuss the implicit ethic behind farterism critique, and its connections with recent transformations of capitalism.

The New Hunter-gatherers: Making Human Interaction Productive in the Network Society

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 Bestand/resource, from which value may be extracted. The rise of these practices and modes of attention obviously relies on new production and dissemination of technological infrastructures, but it also relies on and contributes to the evolution of hyperrational subjectivity, which is compatible with the demands of late-modern economies. Like corporations, ordinary people come to view leisure time interpersonal interactions as sites for the extraction of (often non-monetary) value through their objectification. The article demonstrates how the objectification and productivization of events remoulds both common everyday practices and extreme forms of criminality, all sharing a common cultural logic.