204.3517 · BA seminar
Technology and Emotion
How dating apps turned love into a product, what happens when chatbots become companions, and how platforms profit from rage, loneliness and grief. Students develop independent qualitative projects.
Dan M. Kotliar
Senior Lecturer in Sociology · University of Haifa
I study the ties between data-driven technologies and contemporary society: how algorithms shape, and are shaped by, culture, politics and everyday life.
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AboutBIO.TXT
I'm a senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology, the University of Haifa. My research explores the deep ties between data-driven technologies and contemporary society. Drawing on cultural sociology, science and technology studies (STS), and the sociology of knowledge, I investigate how algorithms shape, and are shaped by, culture, politics, and everyday life.
From questions of identity, power, and choice to emerging terrains such as AI ethics, AI hype, surveillance, data infrastructures, and AI-driven science, my work examines the ways data-intensive technologies transform social worlds. Together, my research projects highlight the growing influence of algorithms while offering grounded, critical perspectives on some of the most pressing challenges of our datafied age.
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2025
Can't Stop the Hype: Scrutinizing AI's RealitiesKotliar · Information, Communication & Society
Much of what we know about AI's supposed revolutions comes from media sensationalism and marketing hype. This article offers a framework for studying AI that scrutinizes hype while recognizing its power, including a typology of five types of AI hype and six heuristics for examining them.
Read the full text (open access) ↗Silicon Valley Revisited: On Californian Ideologies and the Differences They MakeKotliar · New Media & Society
Based on 50 interviews with Israelis who immigrated to Silicon Valley, this article shows how cross-cultural encounters shape the way developers perceive their algorithms and their ethical implications, and calls for a more diverse view of Silicon Valley's ideologies.
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2024
Commodifying the Microbial Self: Microbiome-based Personalization and the Quest for Symbiotic SingularityGrosglik & Kotliar · Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
A study of a startup selling AI-driven, microbiome-based personalized nutrition, which promises users a symbiotic singularity: a unique human-microbial identity. Users first embrace this identity, but later scale back to a more conventional, modernist view of themselves.
Read the full text (open access) ↗Migrating the State into Corporate CloudsKotliar & Gekker · Information, Communication & Society
What happens when an entire state migrates into corporate clouds? Through the case of Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion government cloud tender, this article traces the ramifications: the state's growing dependence on tech giants, the spread of Silicon Valley data ideologies, and deepening power and information asymmetries between the state and big tech.
Read the full text (open access) ↗Keeping Pegasus on the Wing: Legitimizing Cyber EspionageKotliar & Carmi · Information, Communication & Society
How did NSO Group, the Israeli spyware firm behind Pegasus, defend itself in public? This article identifies four legitimation practices: securitization, Zionist patriotism, ethics washing and normalization, which together help sustain surveillance realism.
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2023
On the Contesting Conceptualisation of the Human Body: Between ‘Homo-Microbis’ and ‘Homo-Algorithmicus’Kotliar & Grosglik · Body & Society 29(3), 81–108
Based on an ethnography of a microbiome-based personalized nutrition project and the start-up that grew out of it, this article shows that the homo-microbial body depends on opaque machine-learning algorithms: homo-microbis is also a homo-algorithmicus.
Read the full text (open access) ↗Contextualizing the Ethics of Algorithms: A Socio-professional ApproachAvnoon, Kotliar & Rivnai-Bahir · New Media & Society 26(10), 5962–5982
Why do the people who build algorithms so often sideline AI ethics? Based on interviews with data scientists, this article identifies three moral logics: ethics as a personal endeavor, ethics as hindering progress, and ethics as a commodity, all rooted in the techno-libertarian culture of engineering.
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Earlier work (2013–2022)▸ MORE.EXE (earlier papers)
Capitalist Subjectivity, Tinder, and the Emotionalization of the WebIllouz & Kotliar (2022) · In Routledge Handbook of Digital Consumption, pp. 229–240
A critical analysis of Tinder and the techno-commodification of emotional life, identifying five ways dating apps reshape sociality, and arguing that understanding online capitalism requires attention to how value is extracted algorithmically from emotions.
Go to the publisher's page ↗What We Talk About When We Talk About AI EthicsAvnoon, Kotliar & Rivnai-Bahir (2021) · Israeli Sociology 22(2), 171–191 (Hebrew)
Based on 60 interviews with Israeli data scientists, this Hebrew-language article asks how they understand and describe algorithmic ethics, and which ideologies and worldviews shape it.
Go to the publisher's page ↗Who Gets to Choose? On the Socio-algorithmic Construction of ChoiceKotliar (2021) · Science, Technology, & Human Values 46(2), 346–375
Based on an ethnography of data analytics companies, this article examines choice-inducing algorithms, systems designed to shape people's choices. It shows they are shaped by their designers' meaning systems, organizational relations, nonhuman agents and geopolitics, and that their deeper aim is to turn people into choosers.
Go to the publisher's page ↗The Return of the Social: Algorithmic Identity in an Age of Symbolic DemiseKotliar (2020) · New Media & Society 22(7), 1152–1167
Algorithmically produced clusters become named identity categories through a return of the social. Such categories are epistemic amalgams of algorithmic output, human expertise and interpersonal factors, which calls their explainability into question.
Go to the publisher's page ↗Data Orientalism: On the Algorithmic Construction of the Non-Western OtherKotliar (2020) · Theory & Society 49, 919–939
Following a user-profiling company as it tries to sell its services to East Asian firms, this article develops the concept of data orientalism. It shows that the algorithmic gaze both continues and reverses the colonial gaze, and argues that algorithms are intercultural, with power flowing in more than one direction.
Go to the publisher's page ↗Transmitted Trauma as Badge of Honor: Phenomenological Accounts of Holocaust Descendant Resilient VulnerabilityKidron, Kotliar & Kirmayer (2019) · Social Science & Medicine 239, 1–9
Drawing on 75 interviews with Jewish-Israeli children of Holocaust survivors, this study finds that descendants normalize and even valorize their emotional wounds, challenging pathologizing models of transmitted trauma and binary views of resilience and vulnerability.
Go to the publisher's page ↗Emotional Oppositions: The Political Struggle over Citizens' EmotionsKotliar (2016) · Qualitative Sociology 39(3), 267–286
A participant observation of Israeli mental health professionals who opposed a bill restricting public mourning of the Nakba, showing how they promoted an oppositional emotional style and treating emotions as a contested political battleground.
Go to the publisher's page ↗Depression Narratives in Blogs: A Collaborative Quest for CoherenceKotliar (2016) · Qualitative Health Research 26(9), 1203–1215
Blogs by women with major depression bridge the seclusion of depression and the public exposure of blogging, letting writers share intimate narratives, build community and revise their stories with readers in narrative sandboxes.
Go to the publisher's page ↗Public Seclusion: Depression Narratives in BlogsKotliar (2013) · Misgarot Media 11, 1–29 (Hebrew)
A Hebrew-language study showing how depression blogs offer a safe private space and a public, supportive community at once, serving as an arena for testing cultural models that might explain depression.
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TeachingTEACHING.DAT
Questions about course topics, attendance or anything else? Write to me.
204.3199 · BA
The Sociology of Algorithms
How algorithms shape identity, communication, choice and taste; whether they reinforce inequalities; and why they are, above all, cultural artifacts.
204.1019 · BA
Qualitative Research Methods
Hands-on observation and in-depth interviewing: forming questions, designing a study, analyzing data, research ethics and academic writing.
204.4323 · MA
AI and Organizational Development: A Critical Sociological View
How algorithmic systems redefine power, responsibility, efficiency and fairness in organizations, and reshape the role of consultants and change leaders.
BA
Introduction to STS
How facts are produced and "objectivity" constructed, how technologies embody values, applied to climate change, autonomous vehicles, genetics and more.
BA
The Politics of Knowledge
How statistics, categories and expertise shape identities, authority and inequality, and what it means to live in a "post-truth" era.
UpdatesNEWS.TXT
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Chronic Crisis, an international conference in sociology and anthropology we are convening in Tel Aviv, a day before the national elections, asking what happens to a society when emergency becomes routine. Program and registration
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An anti-war petition, signed by faculty and students at the University of Haifa, published in Haaretz.
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A statement by Israeli sociologists and anthropologists regarding the war in Gaza.
ContactCONTACT.EXE
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Office hoursTuesdays & Wednesdays, 10:00–12:00By appointment, please email in advance. Rabin Building, room 7014 · +972-4-824-9396