![Sample our Built Environment journals, sign in here to start your access, Latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5926/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Built-Environment.jpg"})
Abstract
Although digital technologies are implicated in intrusive surveillance and social fragmentation, their widespread uses in recent political protests demonstrate their potentials to support intense forms of collective life. Building on Mark Hansen’s new-media philosophy, this paper explores digital crowds as an intensified form of a contemporary phenomenon: the intertwinement of digital media with social life. Enveloped in technospheres of data-rich devices, the digital crowd forms hybrids with its environment of distributed digital intelligence, what Hansen conceptualizes as System-Environment Hybrids. Sampling the visible trace of such SEHs on Instagram, the article posits that their impacts on crowd formations signal a distinct form of collective life. It argues that the hybrid intensifies the affect and de-individuation processes of conventional pre-digital crowds, and extends such effects well beyond crowd events into persistent online environments of insatiable exchange. The paper speculates that intensified and persistent affect transform the emotional geography of the city.
Notes
1. Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2011), XI–XII, XXI, 22–28. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism & Left Politics, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 52.
2. Previous research includes: Hazem Ziada, “Undulating Grounds, Undisciplined Bodies: The Soviet Rationalists and the Kinaesthesis of Revolutionary Crowds,” The Journal of Architecture 18, no. 4 (2013): 591–617. DOI:
10.1080/13602365.2013.809372; Hazem Ziada, “To See (Like) a Crowd,” Architectural Histories 3, no. 1 (2015): 13. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ah.co; Hazem Ziada, “What Brings Them There? Reflections on the Persisting Symbolism of Cairo’s Tahrīr Square,” Cities Jadaliyya, 2015. Available online: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/21254/what-brings-them-there-reflections-on-the-persistin; and Hazem Ziada, “Tahrir’s Juncture,” (paper presented at the Biannual Conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE), Coimbre, Portugal, October 4–7, 2018).
3. Mark B. N. Hansen, “System-Environment Hybrids,” in Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-order Systems Theory, Science and Cultural Theory, ed. Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 119–125.
4. Stable referencing for the Instagram accounts are challenging. Specific images or assemblages are situated in a fluidity of feeds. This interface is neither paginated nor subdivided using stable headings. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, Instagram emphasizes the relentless visual continuity of assemblages over discrete posts. Moreover, as users capture, exchange and post images on the account feeds that they manage, the assemblages shuffle and re-arrange. Displayed on Instagram’s interface in a continuous matrix ‘in quite large numbers on busy accounts’, the images foreground neither author ‘i.e. immediate source’ nor date- and time-stamps. To identify such features, further clicking and probing is required. As a result, one cannot easily refer the reader to a specific assemblage by page-number, section-heading date or name. While in most cases it was possible to reach the copyright owners of specific images on their feeds, it proves less possible to identify or reach ‘authors’. One reason might be the account-holders’ wish to protect themselves from censorship or worse fates.
5. Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (London; Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books, 2018), 214.
6. Charles Baudelaire, “The Crowd,” in Paris Spleen Little Poems in Prose, ed. C. Baudelaire and K. Waldrop (transl.). (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 22–23.
7. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 15–16.
8. Dean, Crowds and Party, 122–123.
9. Canetti, quoted in Dean, Crowds and Party, 121.
10. Dean, Crowds and Party, 93–114.
11. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 17–30.
12. Dean, Crowds and Party, 141–142.
13. Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “The Mass Panorama,” MODERNISM/Modernity 9, no. 2 (2002): 243–244, 255–263.
14. Ziada, “To See (Like) a Crowd,” 6–7.
15. Lev Manovich, “The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 Hours in Kiev,” Manovich, n.p; Available online: http://www.the-everyday.net/p/the-extraordinary-and-everyday.html (accessed January 5, 2020).
16. Hansen, “System Environment Hybrids,” 119.
17. Ibid, 115.
18. Ibid, 115–127. Significantly, Hansen’s discussions of SEHs largely focus on individuals’ interactions with, and experiences of, digital environments. This article extends SEH deployment to collective behaviors like crowds where interactive experiences with digital media, and amongst human agents, considerably intensify. While crowd exchanges do involve measures of closure and independence from the digital environment’s agency, this article focuses on discerning the latter.
19. Alicia Chester, “The Outmoded Instant: From Instagram to Polaroid,” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism 45, no. 5 (2018): 13–14.
20. Mark B. N. Hansen, “The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life,” Critical Inquiry, 30 no. 3 (2004): 589.
21. Ibid., 584–590.
22. Jodi Dean, “Faces as Commons: The Secondary Visuality of Communicative Capitalism,” Open! Platform for Art, Culture & the Public Domain: Commonist Aesthetic (2016), n.p. Available online: https://onlineopen.org/faces-as-commons (accessed January 5, 2020).
23. Ibid., n.p.
24. Mark B. N. Hansen. “Engineering Pre-Individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st-Century Media,” Substance 41, no. 3 (2012): 42–45.
25. Ibid., 51.
26. Ibid., 43, 51.
27. Dean, “Faces as Commons,” n.p.
28. Ulrich Gutmair and Chris Flor, “Hysteria and Cyberspace: Interview with Slavoj Zizek,” Telepolis, 1998, n.p. Available online: https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Hysteria-and-Cyberspace-3440031.html (accessed January 5, 2020).
29. Dean, “Faces as Commons,” n.p.
30. Clorinde Peters, “Neoliberal Violence, Online Protest Images, and Constructing the Photography of the Commons,” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism 45, no. 5 (2018): 21.
31. Based on review of Instagram feeds on Hong Kong protests. Also: K. K. Rebecca Lai, “How Universities Became the New Battlegrounds in the Hong Kong Protests” (Photo-essay), New York Times, November 19, 2019. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/18/world/asia/hong-kong-protest-universities.html (accessed January 5, 2020).
32. Ethan Bronner, “Bahrain Tears Down Monument as Protesters Seethe,” New York Times, March 18, 2011. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/19/world/middleeast/19bahrain.html (accessed January 5, 2020).
33. Ziada, “What Brings Them There?,” n.p.; also: Ziada, “Tahrir’s Juncture,” in-process.
34. Filip Noubel, “Beirut Demonstrations Honored in a Map Showing Protest as a Process of Live ‘City-Making’,” Global Voices, November 11, 2019, n.p. Available online: https://globalvoices.org/2019/11/11/beirut-demonstrations-honored-in-a-map-showing-protest-as-a-process-of-live-city-making (accessed January 5, 2020).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Hazem Ziada
Hazem Ziada, PhD, is an architectural theorist, historian, educator and a registered architect in Egypt. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Architecture and M. Arch Program Director at the School of Art, Design & Architecture, University of Huddersfield (UK). He received his PhD in Architecture from the College of Architecture at Georgia Institute of Technology, 2011. He has taught in US and UK schools of architecture and art history. Besides exploring pedagogical issues and the poetics of building systems and technologies in architecture, his main research focus probes the spatial morphology and graphic representations of political practice in historic and contemporary contexts. His publications and ongoing research have engaged such issues in early Soviet architecture, in congregational ritual and in Cairo’s urbanism. Recently, his research has focused on the contemporary socio-cultural conditions and technological apparatus of crowd formations.