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Sociological Theory for Digital Society
The Codes that Bind Us Together
Ori Schwarz
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Ori Schwarz 2021
The right of Ori Schwarz to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4296-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4297-0 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Schwarz, Ori, 1979- author.
Title: Sociological theory for digital society : the codes that bind us together / Ori Schwarz.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “How to rethink social theory in our digital times”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021005391 (print) | LCCN 2021005392 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509542963 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509542970 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509542987 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Sociology. | Information society. | Online social networks. | Information technology--Social aspects.
Classification: LCC HM585 .S3776 2021 (print) | LCC HM585 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/33--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005391
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005392
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Jacket image © Robert Hodgin. This digital mirror objectifies social life, bringing together images taken in different times to create a digitally curated representation of the self.
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Acknowledgements
Over the years I discussed the ideas and arguments developed in this book with many people. I am grateful to all of them, but I am especially indebted to Rogers Brubaker and Dan Kotliar, who closely read earlier drafts of the manuscript. This book has been enormously improved by their smart comments and generous suggestions, as well as by the helpful feedback and suggestions of the anonymous readers for Polity, whom I also thank wholeheartedly. Some ideas presented in this book are completely new, others build on and develop insights from my earlier work on the sociology of digital society, but all of them have benefited greatly from countless conversations over the years with colleagues, including Eran Fisher, Eva Illouz and Guy Shani (with whom I co-authored an article discussed in chapter 2), and students, especially Inbar Michelzon-Drori and Sagit Festman. I could not ask for more supportive colleagues than those I have at Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. I also wish to thank everyone at Polity Press for their dedicated and professional support, advice and encouragement – it has been a pleasure to work with you all – and particularly to Jonathan Skerrett, who believed in this project from the very first moment, even before I did; and Fiona Sewell, for her careful copyediting. Last but not least, my love and gratitude go to Hila Keren, with whom I share my life, of which this book has happened to constitute a significant part for quite a while; her support and feedback were invaluable.
1 Introduction: Old disciplines, new times, revised theories
The introduction of digital technologies into an ever-growing number of social institutions, practices and routines over the last few decades has reshaped social relations, structures and dynamics across social spheres in various ways. New patterns of sociality emerge with new forms of structure and agency. These changes surely deserve empirical research, and indeed enjoy much research attention in sociology (often under the title of ‘digital sociology’) and adjacent disciplines. But do they make an appropriate topic for a sociological theory book? One may have legitimate doubts. After all, Sociological Theory (not to be confused with ‘theories’ in the plural and more humble sense, ad hoc explanations for particular empirical phenomena) supplies sociologists with the conceptual tools, categories of thought and postulates without which we cannot even start representing social reality and making sense of it. Too often sociological theory debates are conducted as if these tools predated concrete social realities and have nothing to do with their changing.
The core questions of sociological theory are so abstract and fundamental they seem timeless and beyond time: questions of ontology; the choice of units of analysis; temporality; social action and its motives; power, causality and social change; structure and agency; knowledge and epistemology. It has never been possible and never will be to study social life, explain it, or even humbly describe it without first answering these timeless questions, explicitly or implicitly. This simply cannot be done without choosing units of analysis and making certain assumptions about their relations, the ways they can be studied, and how they may interact and change. Every sociology student is familiar with these eternal oppositions
