The Digital Crowd: Some Questions on Globalization and Agency

Abstract

Introduction The Internet appears to offer renewed participation in the public sphere. Such positive claims for the Internet might derive from the conservative political context of the previous decade, with its general disillusionment with the democratic processes available. This appears to be the result of a search for a new sense of community and collectivism. Since democracy is about the exchange of information rather than information itself, the Internet and World Wide Web appear to offer itself as a perfect model of interconnectedness. But what are the conditions under which this information exchange takes place, and what purpose does it serve? Surely, access alone does not ensure good participation. This essay offers the metaphor of the crowd as one way of describing the agents (those that have the power to act for effect) in this Internet space, and to reveal some insights into the possibility for collective action. By the use of this collective noun, the I am not merely describing any type of collective (of a generic community, or the public), but what historian George Rude has called a direct-contact or face-to-face group.' Rude's scope is the period immediately leading to the Industrial Revolution that he identifies as 1848. For the purposes of this argument, I will first concentrate on the defining characteristics of the preindustrial and industrial crowd, and then proceed to digitize them. This essay seeks to make a comparison with the present condition of what might be called the postindustrial or information society that makes contact on a global scale. There is a surplus of fashionable terms here, not least of which is that this crowd now operates under the forces of globalization. According to Doreen Massey, one of the problems is the way we talk about terms such as globalization without adjectives.2 Without further qualification, it appears as an inevitable force rather than a project with specific agencies and interest groups. The crowd also appears as a unifying force acting like a single body or machine, and this also needs qualification. While crowds behave differently in different contexts, they have common elements such as those of direct action and a fundamental belief in their collective aims. So what happens when these social relationships are indirect and stretched across global space? An earlier version of this paper was presented at the symposium Vision Plus 4: The Republic of Information, Carnegie Mellon University, March 1998.