The sociology of coffee culture as a moral infrastructure: social media visibility and identity formation

This article examines Saudi café culture as a moral infrastructure through which social media visibility shapes identity formation. Drawing on approximately 600 h of ethnographic observation across 123 cafés in seven Saudi cities, the study analyzes how everyday practices of ordering, seating, photographing and sharing become publicly legible markers of belonging. The analysis shows that cafés function as semi-public stages where identity is performed through the interplay of aesthetic display, affective coordination and digital circulation. Social media operates not as an external layer but as an embedded infrastructure that organizes visibility, recognition and moral evaluation. Three mechanisms structure this process: recognition, affective synchronization and boundary-policing. These mechanisms translate routine interactions into collectively shared moral expectations. The findings demonstrate that café sociability in Saudi Arabia reflects a hybrid social logic in which tradition and modernity, piety and performance, are co-constituted through embodied and platform-mediated interaction. The article contributes to symbolic interactionism and the sociology of affect by theorizing coffee culture as a site where everyday practices produce moral order in post-digital urban life.