Crowds and Technology

Monday, October 17th, 2016

Mobs, demagogues, and populist movements are obviously not new:

What is new and interesting is how social media has transformed age-old crowd behaviors. In the past decade, we’ve built tools that have reconfigured the traditional, centuries-old relationship between crowds and power, transforming what used to be sporadic, spontaneous, and transient phenomena into permanent features of the social landscape. The most important thing about digitally transformed crowds is this: unlike IRL crowds, they can persist indefinitely. And this changes everything.

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To translate Canetti’s main observations to digital environments:

  1. The crowd always wants to grow — and always can, unfettered by physical limitations
  2. Within the crowd there is equality — but higher levels of deception, suspicion, and manipulation
  3. The crowd loves density — and digital identities can be more closely packed
  4. The crowd needs a direction — and clickbait makes directions cheap to manufacture

Translating Eric Hoffer’s ideas to digital environments is even simpler: the Internet is practically designed to enable the formation of self-serving patterns of “true belief.”

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