Studying life in the mob….
Anyone who watches (let alone experiences) a “flash mob” (here and here) cannot help but be amazed at capacity of folks to harness, shape and literally direct collective action. But getting past the “awesome”-ness of it, there are some really interesting questions to ask and comments to make.
There seems to be a general (and unproven) rule regarding the “new technology” that anything we are anxious or concerned about turns out to have a net positive impact. The “biggy” in this regard was the prediction and fear that computers and the internet will isolate us all, increasing alienation and promoting anti-social behavior (see here for interesting exposition from Chinese analyst). The counter arguments — that the fears were exaggerated or that new forms of sociability will replace old — are proving fascinatingly correct. The fact that “promise-trumps-anxiety” is a topic worth exploring.
Even more significant has been the impact of the new technology on our views of collective behavior, especially as it relates to “cults” and “mobs”. Two dominant tropes of the recent past have been the “lemmings to the sea” (derived from a “Disney myth”; see here) and “day of the locust” (associated with Nathaniel West novel; see here) metaphors that have all too often been used to justify laws and other actions that attempt to constrain the undesirable potential threats (real and imagined) that cults and mobs represented. These constraints relate to two dangers: that a collective assembly can turn into an ugly mob unless governed; and that a governed mob can turn to cultish behavior if over-controlled. Assuming the best of intentions, efforts to strike a balance can be seen as the rationale for fostering what Foucault called “governmentality” which plays a central role in making us all “governable.”
Flash mobs and the like are just the latest and most public examples of a different perspective that emerged from the study of chaos and complexity in the 1980s and by the mid-1990s had taken the form of “artificial life” studies. Questions about the underlying “emergent” mechanisms that generated social behavior among “other species” (from Wilson’s work on the sociobiology of ants to the examination of flocking birds) were initially accepted as further proof of the lack of human capacity to naturally harness the positive potential of emergent collective action — it just wasn’t in our genes!
The creation and study of algorithm-driven artificial life led to a rethinking of the possibilities, but experiments with “mobs” outside the safe confines of computer simulations were out of the question. Nevertheless, some natural experiments have emerged on the political (e.g., the color revolutions) and artistic stages (flash mobs) that cannot be ignored by students of collective behavior.
The key here is obviously the spread of what analysts are now calling “locative media” (read here and here) — itself an emergent institution being inadvertently generated by the commercial development of location-based “devices” (e.g., cell phones) and location-based services (e.g., GPS and iPhone “apps”). The old fears and anxieties about panoptic surveillance risks and the threat to privacy are clearly warranted, and the careful examination of these “downsides” requires as much attention as ever. But we social scientists also need to stand back a bit and consider the impact and implications — both positive and negative — of these new developments in collective behavior.
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