![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The concept of online crowds reflects a shift in crowd semantics occasioned by the spread of digital media. It poses an alternative to the classical notion of crowd by addressing gatherings in digital rather than physical space. Researching online crowds assumes individual participation to be additive as inferred from tweets grouped around hashtags in microblogging. However, tweets may be understood as a type of inter-textual communication rather than spontaneous displays of emotion. It suggests that online gatherings inferred from these displays do not necessarily reflect the transformation of digital connectivity into crowds. Instead, digitally connected individuals assert their individuality to become members of a swarm. Compared with networks and multitudes, swarms do not separate the parts from the whole to imply a type of collectivism that subsists on the contradiction of the individualized whole. Online crowds are, therefore, not crowds per se but an instance of swarming where digital connectivity provides rationalized conditions for individual thoughts, feelings and actions to be grouped into convergent activities resembling self-organization without central control.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Raymond Lee is a non-affiliated researcher of modernity, crowds and mass behavior. His recent work on crowds and swarms appeared in Distinktion (2014, 2016). He was previously on the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Malaya.
Notes
1. However, recent advances in mobile communications invalidate this distinction as online and media technologies have become interchangeable (see Hjorth, Burgess, and Richardson Citation2012).
2. The idea of crowds as rational entities could also be a source of influence for this view. Support for this view can be gauged in the post-Le Bon, American-inspired research on crowd rationality (see Borch Citation2006).
3. The connected participant is also central to networks, multitudes and swarms. However, the connective rationality in these collectivities is not always framed by the lack of physical co-presence. Unlike online crowds, these collectivities may require a certain degree of physical co-presence to generate effective organization. This could be one reason why network relationships are treated as more important than the role of digital media in the organization of large-scale movements (Bennett and Segerberg Citation2012, 751).
4. Focusing on the self-organizing capacities of these collective situations constitutes the area of swarm intelligence from which models of artificial intelligence are developed. It is not my intention to discuss swarm intelligence here (see Bonabeau Citation1999).
5. In 2013, the Oxford Dictionaries declared selfie as word of the year to suggest that a certain degree of significance could be bestowed on an act as banal as digitally recording and saving a self-image. But this bestowal might also be seen to reflect the increase in attention given to digital technology as a tool for recreating public identities.
6. Coined by Dawkins (Citation1976), the term meme refers to cultural units of behaviour passed from person to person through imitation. In media culture, memes are conveyed as pieces of information that gradually scale into shared social phenomena (Shifman Citation2014, 18). The circulation of selfies can be compared to the conveyance of imageries via memes for structuring convergences (e.g. Deller and Tilton Citation2015).