Crowd Theory Research Articles

Blind Spots in Crowds, Masses, and Multitudes

The brief historical overview comprises an account of classical crowd theories and their contemporary metamorphoses to contextualize the thematic section of the journal. Regarding the proverbial “age of the crowd” of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, a variety of attempts of conceptualization proved controversial but productive. Hyppolite Taine, Scipio Sighele, or Gustave Le Bon approached the phenomenon dominantly in psychological terms foregrounding the destructive elements of mass dynamics. In the interwar period, however, a first wave of differentiation might be detected, insofar as younger academic sub-disciplines, i.e., social statistics, seek to grasp the crowd as a structure with its intricate and partly paradoxical qualities. In recent scholarship, however, the diversification of the concept seems to have become even more complex: by shifting the focus from the “object crowd” to the “subject crowd”, descriptions of the multitude, the network, the swarm, or the assembly reflect the need to think of the crowd as an autonomous agency with emancipatory potentials.

Tourists’ visual attention to cultural landscapes under crowding stimuli: An eye-tracking approach

Research on visual attention and perceived crowding in culture-oriented tourism destinations remains scant. This study examines the effects of varying environmental stimuli on tourists’ visual attention to cultural landscapes. Eye-tracking experiments and self-reported surveys were used to collect data ( n = 50). Participants were asked to view photos presenting varying environmental stimuli (e.g. crowding, mask-wearing measurement, etc.) in two culture-oriented tourism destinations (indoor and outdoor culture-oriented tourism destinations), followed by a questionnaire survey. Findings revealed that tourists paid more attention to the human crowds than cultural landscape when social density increased. Perceived crowding was significantly influenced by visual attention to cultural landscapes in both indoor and outdoor tourism destinations, with more silent effects in indoor settings. The findings of this study extend the normative theory of crowding and dual-process theory, and provide practical insights to optimize design for cultural landscapes and facilities to minimize tourists’ perceived crowding in culture-oriented tourism destinations.

Polynomial and rational convergence rates for Laplace problems on planar domains

Laplace problems on planar domains can be solved by means of least-squares expansions associated with polynomial or rational approximations. Here it is shown that, even in the context of an analytic domain with analytic boundary data, the difference in convergence rates may be huge when the domain is non-convex. Our proofs combine the theory of the Schwarz function for analytic continuation, potential theory for polynomial and rational approximation rates and the theory of crowding of conformal maps.

First they came for the Young Communists: police facilitation and control at COP26, Glasgow

ABSTRACT The COP26 Climate Summit held in Glasgow in November 2021 was expected to attract mass protests. Given the climate crisis and the increase in direct action in the UK, the police anticipated huge numbers with the potential for significant disorder. Despite this, Police Scotland insisted that they were committed to facilitating peaceful protest. Drawing on ethnographic observation and interviews with both police and protestors, this paper offers analysis of a contentious event during the large set-piece demonstration on Saturday 6 November. It focuses on the containment of a small group of Young Communists to ask what this tells us about ‘facilitation’, crowd theory, and police-protestor relations. Whilst fairly insignificant in terms of numbers, we argue that the YCL containment offers valuable insights into protest policing and facilitation.

Geopolitics of mobile masses: refugee and tourist metaphors in Finnish-Russian bordertown media

This paper examines the discourses on mobile others as objects of massification or likened to natural forces. By creating a dialogue between theories of crowds/masses and popular geopolitics, we examine how a local media frames the actual, imagined and absent border crossings of refugees and tourists when a voluminous mobile group disappears in tandem with an emerging unease about a new mobile group. We focus on the freesheet Imatralainen, published in a South Karelian Finnish-Russian bordertown that has been a tourist destination since the late eighteenth century but where invisible geopolitical tension is part of everyday life. Our discourse analysis shows that from the Crimean crisis to the migrant ‘crisis’ (2014–2016), local media have frequently portrayed Russian tourists and non-European migrants via a natural force rhetoric while viewing both refugees and tourists as potential resources or burdens. The mobility of others can represent itself as an external threat, and it can be taken as a perspectival threatscape that opens space for geopolitical issues amplified or transformed through the idea of masses and crowds into potential local issues. The article contributes to tourism geographies and the geopolitics of mobilities literature by evaluating the potential of classical crowd theories for understanding how threatscapes relating to the refugee-tourist nexus are made and manipulated by linguistic collectivisation, silencing and dehumanisation. We argue that more attention should be given to the role of the local in shaping the popular geopolitics of mobilities that construct, sustain and fabricate discourses of ‘otherness’ and massification.

Jesus, the Crowds, and Historical Agency

Abstract Crossley and Myles’s Jesus: A Life in Class Struggle offers an innovative and accessible reading of the movement around Jesus in terms of class struggle. The authors combine a breadth of knowledge about first-century realities, acumen in exegesis of the Gospel texts, and contemporary crowd theory to reach new conclusions regarding Jesus and his disciples, especially in his last days, and regarding the ‘failure’ of their movement. This review examines their understanding of the ‘Jesus movement’ and its relationship to the Galilean peasantry and their methodology in extrapolating from the Gospels; and proposes a more thorough Marxist theorization of the Gospels’ role in producing the ‘failure’ they describe.

The Periodical as a Playhouse: Wyndham Lewis’s ‘Enemy of the Stars’ in <i>Blast</i> (1914)

Modernist plays in the early twentieth century often resisted the theatre. Many circulated in print, in ‘little magazines’ dedicated to literature and the arts. Using Wyndham Lewis’s ‘Enemy of the Stars’ (1914) as a case study, this article considers what the medium of the little magazine offered modernist playwrights. The article first engages with some of Lewis’s earlier periodical publications and his interest in contemporary crowd theory, to trace how his attitude towards performance and the masses developed. Comparing the periodical publication of Lewis’s experimental play to a 1932 revision in book form then reveals that it is precisely the magazine’s dramatic potential that allowed Lewis to stage a closet play to be read by the individual, instead of watched by the masses that he despised. This article thereby argues for an understanding of the modernist periodical as a highly performative medium, and acknowledges its vital role in shaping modernist aesthetics.

Strike and tangle: Crowd control in the digital media environment

To better understand crowds and crowd control practices in the digital media environment, this article briefly probes two institutions that practice ‘crowd control’ online: a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike and a social media analytics service called CrowdTangle. These two firms continue the discourses of crowd theory in the traditions of criminologist Scipio Sighele and crowd psychologist Gustave Le Bon, adjusted for the new affordances of digital technology. The digital media environment affords infrastructure for forensically individualizing and influencing mass behaviour in the styles of Foucauldian and Deleuzian discipline, control and ‘moulding’. The probe concludes by emphasizing the political stakes of increasingly sophisticated crowd control infrastructures made possible through digital media environments.

Crowded Choreographies: From Assembly to Association and Back Again

Motivated by Melissa Ziad's balletic protest within Algeria's Hirak demonstrations, this article recuperates a distinction between the right to assembly and the right to free speech, constitutional guarantees blurred under contemporary rhetoric of association. By applying methods of dance studies to legal interpretation, it shifts crowd theory away from an anxiety of touch toward a copresence that allows for constituent power of the people to be reclaimed. Therefore, it intervenes within a broader discourse of the legal humanities that privileges the logocentric over embodied ways of knowing.

Crowds and Popular Power: Reading Elias Canetti in Caracas

Abstract: There are strong continuities between crowd theory, which flowered during the early twentieth century, and theories of populist mobilization. Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power (1960) bridges these two literatures. Canetti gives us two relatively underappreciated ideas—the sting of command and the impulse for survival—that explain how populist movements change over time. To demonstrate how Canetti's work speaks to theories of populism, I draw on my fieldwork in Caracas, Venezuela. Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution was, arguably, the most progressive political movement of the twenty-first century, but it veered wildly off course. Crowd theory gives us tools to track this transformation. Rather than imagining that populist movements are vacuous from the outset, Canetti directs attention toward their animating grievances. This article considers how the grievances that fed the Bolivarian Revolution eventually consumed it; this is a modest attempt to understand how one of the most promising political movements in recent memory ended up such a long way from where it started.

Crowds, Race, Colonialism: On Resuscitating Classical Crowd Theory

Abstract: Crowd psychologist Gustave Le Bon is often seen as emblematic of fin-de-siècle crowd theory. Widely read in the 1890s, Le Bon's work was later critiqued for its gendered descriptions and political biases. This essay reconsiders fin-de-siècle crowd theory in light of postcolonial critique and asks whether parts of this tradition merit attention in discussion of crowd action today. While Le Bon's work is based on a racial hierarchy and subscribes to a colonial episteme, the situation is more complex when it comes to sociologists such as Gabriel Tarde and Émile Durkheim. While elements of their work can be subjected to postcolonial critique, their theorization on crowds points to distinctly collective dimensions of crowd action that are important to revive.

Breaking the DFT Energy Bias Caused by Intramolecular Hydrogen-Bonding Interactions with MESSI, a Structural Elucidation Method Inspired by Wisdom of the Crowd Theory.

The use of quantum-based NMR methods to complement and guide the connectivity and stereochemical assignment of natural and unnatural products has grown enormously. One of the unsolved problems is related to the improper calculation of the conformational landscape of flexible molecules that have functional groups capable of generating a complex network of intramolecular H-bonding (IHB) interactions. Here we present MESSI (Multi-Ensemble Strategy for Structural Identification), a method inspired by the wisdom of the crowd theory that breaks with the traditional mono-ensemble approach. By including independent mappings of selected artificially manipulated ensembles, MESSI greatly improves the sense of the assignment by neutralizing potential energy biases.

Mobs, Crowds, and Trolls: Theorizing the Harassment of Journalists in the Philippines

Using the Philippines as a case study, we draw on crowd theory to understand how and why online mobs gather to harass reporters. Under Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency, his administration and supporters targeted independent journalism using violent tactics online and offline, including threats of rape, death, and doxing. Yet, when online mobs harass reporters it is not simply an extension of state censorship. Rather, understanding the dynamics that spur regular social media users to take part in anti-press mobs requires a less hierarchical approach. Nor can we simply blame technology for facilitating mob censorship. We argue that crowds are formed from the bottom up, are loosely organized, and intensely felt. These crowds do not necessarily share goals or identities despite their collective affect and aesthetics. Instead, more sustained types of subjectivity emerge from involvement in the crowd. Ultimately, journalism studies can benefit from the insights of crowd theory that emphasize the plasticity of the subject and the ways in which ideas and feelings spread in rapid and unpredictable ways online.

Stimulating civic behavior? The paradoxes of incentivising self-organization

ABSTRACT Crowding theory has highlighted the unintended consequences that well-meant financial incentives can have on behaviour. Using field research, this study applies crowding theory to self-organising citizens’ initiatives in the Netherlands. Citizens’ initiatives create different kinds of goods and services and are sometimes supported by governmental ‘citizens’ initiatives stimulation funds’. We found that (1) the crowding effect is multifaceted; (2) the psychological processes and mechanisms of crowding in and out are subtle and can happen simultaneously; (3) in some instances, stimulation funds seem to have affected the preferences of the initiatives, such as expectations about the funds’ presence and procedures; and, (4) stimulation funds are well-suited to instrumentally support the initiatives in realising their plans and ambitions, but less suited in fostering civic behaviour or spontaneous self-organisation. Our research raises important considerations about the possibilities and constraints for stimulating civic behaviour through stimulating citizens’ initiatives.

Congregating as a social phenomenon; the social glue that binds

PurposeThis study aims to consolidate and hone existing spectating and crowd theory. This is achieved by marrying socio-cultural ideas and concepts from related disciplines.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual review examines what people do when they congregate at an event, and in doing so, answers the question of what they forgo when denied a crowd. Concepts are teased from the literature as to what happens during participatory congregation (in company, in situ), punctuated by relegation without it.FindingsRelated concepts are organised into a typology. The metamodel is the essence of the paper and includes four themes: (1) identity construction, (2) interacting with others, (3) producing and co-producing the event and (4) the allure of tribalism.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper is conceptual and therefore a typology (not a taxonomy). This implies that while it is likely transferable, it is not generalisable. It is manual and subjective, as opposed to objective and automatic. Notwithstanding future research implications, it is intended to inform those considering running virtual events.Practical implicationsEvent organisers are informed as to the “what” and “why” of running community events. It encourages a more circumspect, humanistic view that events are not merely a source of revenue.Social implicationsThis review contributes a macro understanding of human nature, complementing a micro understanding of crowd behaviour.Originality/valueVirtual event management is a relatively new and burgeoning field. Prior to the Pandemic an event without a crowd was almost inconceivable.

VR Toolkit for Identifying Group Characteristics

Visualising crowds is a key pedestrian dynamics topic, with significant research efforts aiming to improve the current state-of-the-art. Sophisticated visualisation methods are a standard for modern commercial models, and can improve crowd management techniques and sociological theory development. These models often define standard metrics, including density and speed. However, modern visualisation techniques typically use desktop screens. This can limit the capability of a user to investigate and identify key features, especially in real time scenarios such as control centres. Virtual reality (VR) provides the opportunity to represent scenarios in a fully immersive environment, granting the user the ability to quickly assess situations. Furthermore, these visualisations are often limited to the simulation model that has generated the dataset, rather than being source-agnostic. In this paper we implement an immersive, interactive toolkit for crowd behaviour analysis. This toolkit was built specifically for use within VR environments and was developed in conjunction with commercial users and researchers. It allows the user to identify locations of interest, as well as individual agents, showing characteristics such as group density, individual (Voronoi) density and speed. Furthermore, it was used as a data-extraction tool, building individual fundamental diagrams for all scenario agents, and predicting group status as a function of local agent geometry. Finally, this paper presents an evaluation of the toolkit made by crowd behaviour experts.

Междисциплинарный синтез в теории поведенческого дизайна

Popular digital products such as TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are created by using digital persuasion technologies, which mark the modern stage in the development of behavioral design. This study seeks to outline the evolution of the concept of behavioral design by applying an interdisciplinary approach and bringing together physiology, psychology, addictology, sociology, computer science, political science, economics, and ethics. The concept of behavioral design originated and is developing as a synthesis of the ideas of the physiological theory of reflexes and reinforcement, psychoanalytic crowd theory and operational conditioning, theories of public opinion management and organizational change, institutional concepts of consumer behavior, computerization and the development of data networks. Behavioural design is used in a variety of areas ranging from architecture to health care and social security. Regarding the use of digital technologies in politics and socio-political processes, however, it is necessary to identify, monitor and control online manipulative practices, especially in relation to minors.

Toward an agency and reactance theory of crowding: Insights from COVID-19 and the tourism industry.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, this article endeavors to offer expeditious insights into the impact of the global humanitarian crisis on the tourism industry from a consumer behavior perspective. To do so, this article employs the theory of crowding as an overarching theoretical lens, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) as a context to represent a global humanitarian crisis, and the rapid review approach as a method to source maiden evidence. In doing so, this article sheds light on instances of undercrowding (undertourism) and overcrowding (overtourism) in tourism as a result of COVID‐19, with interpretations enriched by agency theory and reactance theory—thereby resulting in the emergence of a new theory called the agency and reactance theory of crowding. The article concludes with pragmatic implications in light of the global humanitarian crisis.

From connection to contagion

AbstractThis essay proposes that we ‘think data’ with a complex legacy of work, once disavowed and now resurgent in social theory, on crowd formations. I propose this move because social media platforms’ mobilization of data – the extractions, ever‐shifting reaggregations, and micro‐targeting, on the one hand, and our engagements, re‐tweets, acts of sharing, and production of virality, on the other – has fuelled such anxious concern about the very things that animated much crowd theory in the first place. Key among these concerns are the force of emotional contagion and the threat of social dissolution; the composition of ‘the social’ by elements that well exceed the human; and pressing questions about the media through which energetic forces travel, often with lightning speed. What questions might be enabled by attending to the resonance between crowd theory's ‘anti‐liberal’ preoccupations and contemporary concerns over how social media platforms crowd us?

Where and how to launch your forestry crowdfunding campaign? Evidence from China

Public good crowdfunding, an emerging online channel, provides a novel way for forestry projects to raise funds from a large number of donors to make contribution to the ecological benefits. A number of crowdfunding platforms have developed rapidly in China. However, it is not clear yet if the platforms are similar in helping the fundraisers of projects about forestry to reach their funding goal. Based on the theories of trust and motivation crowding, we proposed the hypothesis that differences in platform governance strategies affect the performance of projects about forestry. One step further, we investigated matching's impact on the funding outcome of forestry crowdfunding projects. By conducting both qualitative and quantitative analysis using data collected from three Chinese major crowdfunding platforms, we found that platform heterogeneity has a significant impact on the performance of crowdfunding projects about forestry and matching, funds from the corporation when individual donor contribute, crowds out the private provision of public good. These results can help to improve the understanding of platform governance and provide important managerial insight for fundraisers and the platform managers. This evidence shows that we may take advantage of crowdfunding to provide funds for forestry-related ecological services about public projects to further promote and develop ecosystem protection.