The online crowd: a contradiction in terms? On the potentials of Gustave Le Bon's crowd psychology in an analysis of affective blogging

Abstract

The aim of the article is to investigate whether the concept of the ‘crowd’ as developed by Gustave Le Bon can help us understand the new types of affectively charged collectivities created via spontaneous interaction on various social media platforms. To do this I analyze the case of Eva Dien Brine Markvoort's blog, 65 Red Roses, through the lens of crowd psychology. Initially I make a theoretical distinction between three different types of crowds that prioritize the role of physical co-presence in different ways: the traditional body-to-body crowd based on physical co-presence; the mediated crowd, which has a strong offline dimension but uses media technologies as tools or communication environments; and the online crowd, which I define as the affective unification and relative synchronization of a public in relation to a specific online site. Overall I argue that Eva Markvoort enables collective affective processes that can be identified in the responses on the blog, and that she functions as a crowd facilitator, motivating both linguistic and bodily imitation due to her personal prestige and her image-producing embodiment of an abstract disease and problem. On a theoretical level, I conclude that Le Bon's description of the crowd is productive when trying to transpose insights from crowd psychology into a cultural situation characterized by spontaneous and affective relations online.