Tag: social media

A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media is now in production with Polity, due July 2020

A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media

A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media is now in production with Polity. It will be published in the UK in early July 2020 and in the US in August.

Below is the blurb, contents and a collection of wonderful matter-flow illustrations and diagrams the artist Mikey B Georgeson produced for the book and our related collaboration at the Society for the Study of Affect Summer School in Lancaster PA this year. They will become part of an exhibit planned to coincide with the book’s launch in the summer.

The Blurb for A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media

Positing online users as ‘sleepwalkers’, Tony Sampson offers an original and compelling approach for understanding how social media platforms produce subjectivities.

Drawing on a wide range of theorists, including A.N. Whitehead and Gabriel Tarde, he provides tools to track his sleepwalker through the ‘dark refrain of social media’: a refrain that spreads through viral platform architectures with a staccato-like repetition of shock events, rumours, conspiracy, misinformation, big lies, search engine weaponization, data voids, populist strongmen, immune system failures, and far-right hate speech. Sampson’s sleepwalker is not a pre-programmed smartphone junkie, but a conceptual personae intended to dodge capture by data doubles and lookalikes. Sleepwalkers are neither asleep nor wide awake; they are a liminal experimentation in collective mimicry and self-other relationality. Their purpose is to stir up a new kind of community that emerges from the potentialities of revolutionary contagion.

At a time in which social media is influencing more people than ever, A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media is an important reference for students and scholars of media theory, digital media and social media.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Intro

1 Feeling Facts and Fakes

2 On the Viral Spectra of Somnambulism

Coda Christchurch; El Paso

3 The Virality of Experience Capitalism

Segue A Dark [Viral] Refrain

4 Immunity, Community and Contagion

5 Deeper Entanglements

Outro Disrupting the Dark Refrain

Notes

Index

Illustrations and Diagrams

La gran guerra de los memes en la política

I contributed to this interesting article on memes and politics in the Colombian newspaper El Espectador earlier this month.

El Mundo

3 Sep 2018 – 9:00 PM

Nicolás Marín Navas

Las ideas, ideologías y emociones ya no se transmiten como en el pasado. Las redes sociales han comenzado a tener un fuerte impacto en la política. El meme, que nació para hacer reír, lleva consigo mensajes que podrían llegar a influir en la opinión pública.

“Si usted va a votar por Hillary Clinton en 2016, levante su mano. Ahora, úsela para golpearse, porque usted es un idiota”. La frase se viralizó acompañada con una imagen de la entonces candidata presidencial estadounidense del partido demócrata. En ese momento el poder de los memes era desconocido para muchos, pues era considerado como contenido dirigido exclusivamente a divertir a las personas.

Meses después se conocería que el equipo del presidente elegido, Donald Trump, estuvo monitoreando las redes sociales y hablando con usuarios influyentes del país para imponer nuevas tendencias en la opinión pública.

Según lo anterior, publicado por Politico Magazine, hoy en día las naciones se pueden atacar de muchas formas: con misiles, bombas, hackear su sistema de seguridad digital o usar una herramienta tan sencilla como los memes. Los gobiernos se habrían dado cuenta del poder que han adquirido en la vida de las personas y habrían sido utilizados como una de las armas más poderosas para influir en la política. ¿Realmente son peligrosos o son simples imágenes para hacer reír?

Lo que ocurrió en los comicios de 2016 en Estados Unidos es uno de los ejemplos más cercanos que existen en la actualidad para entender las nuevas dinámicas de ataque que medios de todo el mundo han comenzado a denunciar. El periodista Ben Schreckinger aseguró en Politico Magazine que, durante esas elecciones, se realizó la gran guerra del meme, en la que un grupo de personas llevaron a cabo una campaña paralela a la convencional de Trump y, por otro lado, atacaron a su contendiente, Hillary Clinton.

Schreckinger asegura que no hay evidencia de que los memes ganaran las elecciones, pero que con seguridad cambiaron su tono, especialmente en las redes sociales, donde se mueven rápidamente. “Los memes crearon una gran cantidad de iconografía pro Trump. Además, hicieron énfasis, de manera implacable, en las acusaciones más repugnantes y sensacionalistas contra Clinton, obligando a los medios de comunicación a abordar temas que de otra manera ignorarían”.

Y es que las redes sociales se han convertido en el terreno más fértil para este tipo de contenidos, incluyendo las noticias falsas, muy influyentes en la política actual. Cambridge Analytica es un ejemplo perfecto, pues la compañía robó los datos de más de 80 millones de estadounidenses para detectar sus miedos, pasiones y preferencias con el fin de generar contenido en Facebook e influir en las elecciones de 2016 en ese país. Difundir ideas, estados de ánimo y sentimientos ha desempeñado un papel importante en las sociedades.

Así lo aseguró a El Espectador el profesor de la universidad de East London, Inglaterra, Tony D. Sampson. “Aquellos que desean el poder tratarán de asegurarse de que la población esté compartiendo experiencias similares. La difusión de los estados de ánimo a través de las redes sociales jugó un papel en Trump y en el Brexit, por lo que la política que ha surgido de estos contagios recientes ha sido principalmente de la derecha. Quizás el fracaso de Obama en desafiar el statu quo abrió la oportunidad de propagar un estado de ánimo muy diferente, que, en mi opinión, está causando mucho daño”.

Sin embargo, el lenguaje que manejan no tiene por qué ser necesariamente dañino para una población. Ray Chan, CEO y cofundador de 9gag, uno de los portales más importantes de memes en el mundo, aseguró a este diario: “Según lo que observamos, la mayoría de los memes que se originaron en comunidades en línea parecen ser inofensivos. Sin embargo, todavía depende mucho del contexto, el contenido y cómo lo usan las personas. Al igual que los medios, las personas u organizaciones pueden usar medios o memes para su propia agenda”.

El éxito de los memes en Colombia

Otros países, como México, Francia, Kenia y Nigeria, son otros que han vivido este tipo de campañas en las que se utilizan nuevas herramientas de comunicación para influir en los resultados políticos. Colombia también entra en esta tendencia, dejando ver duras estrategias de persuasión o defensa política en comicios pasados, funciones que identifica la profesora Limor Shifman en su libro Memes en la cultura digital.

La cuenta de Facebook Lord Petrosky, con más de 440.000 seguidores, logró acercar al público con el candidato Gustavo Petro apelando a memes y mensajes humorísticos durante las campañas presidenciales de 2018. El perfil logró que se crearan modelos similares para los otros candidatos con tal de influir en su popularidad.

Un estudio del American Press Institute, publicado en 2015, aseguró que el 82 % de los millenials se informa en los medios digitales, de los cuales Facebook es el más utilizado. Esto explicaría por qué se ha comenzado a entrar en las nuevas plataformas para conseguir votos.

La joya de la corona fue el plebiscito, cuando las redes sociales y WhatsApp se llenaron de imágenes alusivas a campañas del sí y el no. Fotomontajes de Timochenko como presidente, senadores del Centro Democrático con carteles editados e imágenes y cadenas con los supuestos riesgos del castrochavismo fueron algunos de los casos que se vieron. Si bien es difícil determinar si influyeron directamente en los votos, es evidente que tuvieron un fuerte impacto en el debate público.

¿Qué es un meme?

El término nació antes de que existiera internet y las imágenes que hoy conocemos como memes. El primer registro que se tiene es del biólogo Richard Dawkins, en 1976, cuando sugirió que las ideas podían ser transmitidas entre las personas, de cerebro en cerebro, mediante interacciones sociales y replicación. Su modelo, basado en la epidemiología, considera las ideas como pequeñas porciones de información cultural que llevan dentro creencias, historias, leyendas y humor.

Luego su definición se diversificó con los grandes cambios tecnológicos que se han dado en las últimas décadas. De hecho, Sampson difiere de Dawkins al evitar caer en la palabra “meme” y acuñar el término de “viralidad”, que, según él, corresponde más al uso que se le da hoy a ese tipo de contenidos.

Aunque la Real Academia de la Lengua Española todavía no incluye el término en su diccionario, la editorial estadounidense Merriam-Webster mantiene la palabra y la define como “un elemento interesante o entretenido (como una foto o video con subtítulos) o un grupo de artículos del mismo género que se difunde ampliamente en línea, sobre todo en las redes sociales”.

Por su parte, Mc Neil Persand Coll, director de Mercadeo de Que Boleta —una de las cuentas más exitosas de memes en Colombia— aseguró a este diario que el meme se convirtió en una forma cómica de asumir nuestra realidad. “Cuando hay una polémica o sucede algo que nos parece ilógico o que nos incomoda, la mejor forma de convivir con eso es hacerle un meme. Es reírnos de eso que nos afecta o que nos ha sucedido. Hoy en día su importancia es alta, pues termina siendo un escape a la realidad con risas.

El meme como “arma social”

Además de ayudar a atacar adversarios políticos, los memes también sirven para influir y propagar ciertas ideologías en la sociedad, aparte de la política, como si fueran un virus, lo cual entraría en concordancia con la teoría de Dawkins.

Así lo señala el informe “Explorando la utilidad de los memes para campañas de influencia del gobierno de Estados Unidos”, del Centro para Análisis Navales (CNA). Según el documento, los memes pueden ser usados para anticiparse, infectar o tratar un pensamiento viralizado en la opinión pública. Así, se podría influir en campañas xenófobas o antiterroristas, buscando tocar los sentimientos colectivos de las personas o la vulnerabilidad de un sector de la sociedad frente a un tema.

Al respecto, Sampson asegura que durante estos procesos “un grupo intentará persuadir y otro lo contrarrestará. El problema es que los contagios no son fáciles de controlar. Lo que los hace difundir no es mecánico. Son, en su mayoría, factores accidentales y complejos. Nadie sabe exactamente qué se extenderá con más éxito. Los eventos recientes han demostrado que la derecha tiene estados de ánimo contagiosos potentes que ayudan a difundir sus ideas”.

“La educación tiene que ser central a escala global, pero también debe haber nuevas ideas que puedan infectar el estado de ánimo de una población para que pueda empoderarse de sí misma en lugar de volverse dócil a los mensajes de odio”, concluye Sampson.

Call for papers: Affect, Politics, Social Media

Call for papers: Affect, Politics, Social Media

In prolongation of Affect and Social Media #3 Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation welcomes proposals that interpret and explore affective and emotional encounters with social media and the ways in which the interfaces of social media in return modulate affectivity. Fake news have come to be a highly debated framework to understand the consequences of the entanglements of affect, politics and social media. But theories on fake news often fail to grasp the consequences and significance of social media content that are not necessarily fake, but are merely intended to affectively intensify certain political positions.

It is in this context that it becomes crucial to understand the role of affect in relation to the ways in which social media interfaces function, how affective relations are altered on social media and not least how politics is transformed in the attempt to capitalize on the affective relations and intensities potentially fostered on social media.

This special issue invites empirical, theoretical and practical contributions that focus on recent (political) media events – such as Brexit, the US and French elections and the refugee crisis – and how these unfolded on, and are informed by, social media. Proposals might, for instance, address how the Trump campaign allows us to develop a new understanding of the relationship between social media and politics. As such the issue seeks papers that develop new understandings of affective politics and take into account shared experiences, affective intensities, emotional engagements and new entanglements with social media.

For more information, including author guidelines, please visit http://www.conjunctions-tjcp.com/
Deadline 28 November 2017
Articles must be submitted to conjunctions@cc.au.dk

All the best

Tony Sampson, Camilla Reestorff, Hannah Clemmensen, Jonas Fritsch and Jette Kofoed

Brave New World: the pill-popping, social media obsessed dystopia we live in

Image 20170222 6409 1189121 — Shutterstock

Tony D Sampson, University of East London

The Orwellian dystopia of Doublespeak is very much in vogue right now thanks to concerns over Trump’s use of “alternative facts”. But alternative facts are just the tip of a dystopian iceberg that owes more to the soft brainwashing technologies of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than it does to 1984’s harsh Stalinist oppressions and propagandist trickery.

To grasp the Huxleyesque nature of current events we need see them as part of a culture increasingly pervaded by the ideas of neuroscience – what I have termed neuroculture.

The origins of neuroculture begin in early anatomical drawings and subsequent neuron doctrine in the late 1800s. This was the first time that the brain was understood as a discontinuous network of cells connected by what became known as synaptic gaps. Initially, scientists assumed these gaps were connected by electrical charges, but later revealed the existence of neurochemical transmissions. Brain researchers went on to discover more about brain functionality and subsequently started to intervene in underlying chemical processes.

Interpretation of Cajal’s anatomy of a Purkinje neuron, by Dorota Piekorz.

On one hand, these chemical interventions point to possible inroads to understanding some crucial issues, relating to mental health, for example. But on the other, they warn of the potential of a looming dystopian future. Not, as we may think, defined by the forceful invasive probing of the brain in Room 101, but via much more subtle intermediations.

Soma

Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is about a dystopian society that is not controlled by fear, but rendered docile by happiness. The mantra of this society is “everybody’s happy now”. As Alex Hern argues in The Guardian, Huxley presents a more relevant authoritarian dystopia to that of 1984, one that can still be “pleasant to live in for the vast majority, sparking little mass resistance”. The best dystopias are often dressed up as utopias.

Aldous Huxley in 1954.
Wikimedia Commons

It is Huxley’s appeal to emotional conditioning that most significantly resonates with today’s dystopian neurocultures. He noted the clear advantages of sidestepping intellectual engagement and instead appealing to emotional suggestibility to guide intentions and subdue nonconformity.

As such, to achieve its goal, the society of Brave New World combines two central modes of control. First, the widespread use of the joy-inducing pharmaceutical, Soma, and second, a hypnotic media propaganda machine that works less on reason than it does through “feely” encounters.

Today’s neurocultures correspond to these technologies in conspicuous ways. To begin with, the rise of neuro-pharmaceuticals, like Prozac, have drawn attention to a growing societal need for self-medicated happiness. But equally alarming is the rise in prescriptions for ADHD treatments, like Ritalin, which control attention while simultaneously subduing difficult behaviour. The ADHD child’s mental state is a kind of paradoxical docile attentiveness.

The College of Emotional Engineering

Comparisons can also be made between Huxley’s College of Emotional Engineering and contemporary social media. In his book, the college is an important academic institution found in the same building as the Bureaux of Propaganda, with a unique focus on emotional suggestibility. This is where the feely scenarios, emotional slogans and hypnopedic rhymes are written. This kind of propaganda is for mass media consumption, but today’s emotional engineering takes place in far more intimate and contagious arenas of social media.

For example, in 2014, Facebook took part in an experiment designed to make positive and negative emotions go viral. Researchers manipulated the news feeds of over 600,000 users in an attempt to make them pass on positive and negative emotions to others in their network.

Streamlining emotions.
rvlsoft / Shutterstock.com

The idea that social media acts as a vector for both positive and negative emotional contagions might help us to rethink Trump’s ability to seemingly tap into certain negative feelings of disillusioned US voters. Certainly, the contagion of fake news is typically a poisonous concoction of fear and hate. But much of the populist appeal of Trump (and Brexit) has perhaps played on more joyful encounters with celebrity politicians than those experienced with the dry intellectual elites of conventional politics.

Roses or orchids?

The pervasiveness of today’s neuroculture started with the neuroscientific emotional turn in the 1990s. Scientists realised that emotions are not distinct from pure reason, but enmeshed in the very networks of cognition. The way we think and behave is now assumed to be greatly determined by how we feel.

The seismic influence of this profound shift has extended beyond science to economic theories concerned with the neurochemicals that are supposed to affect decision making processes. It also underpins new models of consumer choice focused on the “buying brain”. The advent of neuroeconomics, followed by neuromarketing, has resulted in further spin-offs in product design and branding informed by emotional brain processing. The consumer experience of a brand is now measured according to the frequency of brainwaves correlated with certain attentive and emotional states.

Perhaps there’s nothing new in neuroculture. Advertisers have been trying to infect feelings since the advent of advertisements. Similarly, politicians have been kissing babies for affect since the age of the crowd. Maybe my idea of neuroculture is an example of what has been cynically termed neuro-speculation. But in an age hastened by social media and self-medication, there is a dystopic intensification of infected and manipulated feelings that cannot be ignored.

Not everyone agreed with Huxley’s predictions of a neuroscientific dictatorship. One literary critic once compared him to a rabbit going down a hole only to think all the world was dark.

But it was the attention he received from scientists that should alert us to the profundity of his dystopia. In particular, the 20th century scientist Joseph Needham argued that scientific knowledge is not immune to political interferences. Needham called Huxley’s Brave New World an “orchid garden” – a demonstration that scientific knowledge does not always lead to a bed of roses. Huxley, he noted, helps us to “see clearly what lies at the far end of certain inviting paths”.

Tony D Sampson, Reader in Digital Culture and Communication, University of East London

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

#Affect and Social Media 3.0: Final Call and Registration Now Open

Announcing the final call for academic presentations and artworks for #Affect and Social Media 3.0. A one day conference and sensorium art show at UEL on Thursday 25^th May 2017 at the University of East London’s Dockland Campus.

Confirmed keynote speaker: Prof Jessica Ringrose (UCL)

We are also pleased to announce that registration for this event is now open.

Both the call and link to registration are here: https://www.uel.ac.uk/Events/2017/05/Affect-and-Social-Media-3

Please note that everyone attending must register in advance. Thanks!

£3 for external students

£5 for external workers

Free for UEL staff and students

Free for nonhumans, posthumans etc.

Best wishes to all,

Tony

University of Exeter Contagion Workshop on social media, reality mining and new species of contagion

Contagion

Workshop 2: Social media, reality mining and new species of contagion

A Research and Knowledge Transfer research event
Date	14 May 2013
Time	10:45 to 16:00
Place	Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies

The Contagion project is hosting three workshops, organised through the Society, Technology and Culture Theme of the HASS Strategy. In the last decades there have been heightened attempts to theorise, model and manage the risks of social, financial and biological contagion (Peckham 2013). While the metaphor is widely used, the rules for defining contagions are no longer clear. If contagion emerged as a concern with intimate sexual contact in the 16th Century, and was translated into fear of urban crowds in the 19th Century, and to unease with globalisation in the 20th Century, the 21st Century is coming to terms with the changing coordinates of those contacts, new proximities and distances, new kinds of mediation, aggregation and link-breaking, new vocabularies for affective politics, and a concern with the movement of movement itself (Thrift 2011). As a result, there’s a need to develop resources for understanding how contemporary contagions work and a need to critically evaluate the limits and consequences of analogizing biological, financial and communication processes under the rubric of contagion. In Workshop 2 we will explore the questions: How are social media and ubiquitous computing changing the coordinates and spaces of contagion? What methods can be used to mine reality and to understand the new responses of social networks to information?

AGENDA

11.30 Arrival, coffee and tea

11.45 From virality to neuroculture

Dr Tony D. Sampson (Arts and Digital Industries, University of East London)

12.15 An empirical approach for modelling dynamic contact networks

Dr Eiko Yoneki (Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge)

13.00 Lunch

14.00 The pharmacology of attentive media

Dr Sam Kinsley (Geography, University of Exeter)

14.30 Social media, community-based organisations, and attention work

Dr Matthew Wilson (Geography, University of Kentucky)

15.00 Introducing the DOLLY project: spatialising social media

Dr Matthew Zook (Geography, University of Kentucky)

15.30 Discussion

16.30 Close of workshop

http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/events/details/index.php?event=1059

Call for Papers: Leaking affects and mediated spaces

Call for Papers: Leaking affects and mediated spaces for the Fourth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies
1-3 July 2013 at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Session: Leaking affects and mediated spaces.

Session organisers: Darren Ellis, John Cromby, Lewis Goodings, Tony Sampson and Ian Tucker

We seem to possess the ability to move and to be greatly moved by our daily interactions with increasingly complex forms of electronic media. We are soaked in the seepage of affective information about others (other humans, other beings, other spaces) and continually leak similar stuff about ourselves, both intentionally and unintentionally, and often somewhere in-between the two. For example, signified affective states are issued through the often mundane emoticons ():), kisses (x), and curses (f**k); and our pleasures and pursuits can be captured by sophisticated algorithms that track internet activity. Perhaps digitised space has opened the way to new realms of affective contagions, transactions, communications and doings. To what extent then do we get a sense of the affect-trails that we leave behind and those that we pick up? What kinds of senses are involved and how might we experience them on a day to day basis? Indeed what are the possibilities and limitations of sharing, imparting and capturing affects across this electronic ether? Is there a flattening of affect or is something qualitatively different occurring? Central to these questions are notions of distribution and spatial expression, and the need to understand the affective nature (or not) of the relations and connections between bodies and technologies that form our everyday territories. The sessions that make up this proposal seek to explore these issues in a number of theoretical and empirical ways, with interest in (although not limited to) areas such as surveillance, social media and embodiment.

Key Questions: How do we understand the multiple and fluid ways that affect becomes distributed across and through bodies, technologies and spaces? How is affect marked out and made visible in mediated online spaces? Is affect still a useful way for configuring the expression of intensive processes spatially?

Paper proposals are invited focusing on (although are not limited to):

Surveillance

Social Media

Embodiment

Digital and non-digital topology

Body-technology relations

Novel empirical approaches to studies of affect

Please send abstracts of up to 250 words to Darren Ellis (D.Ellis@uel.ac.uk) before the 20th of January 2013

The Return of Crowd Contagion? 1 of 3

2010-11 will be looked back on as the beginning of a period of social uprising occurring in an age incessantly characterized by social media. Mainstream journalists were indeed quick to note the role of Web 2.0 in triggering new revolutionary and riotous crowds. However, this focus on the often over hyped potential of Web 2.0 applications perhaps loses sight of the event of social rebellion. For such events to ignite there is a requirement for the spontaneous and communicable desires of a crowd to actually spillover onto the streets. Take for example the seemingly disparate uprisings in Egypt and England. In the Cairo neighbourhood of Imbaba the impetus of rebellion was visibly guided by the leaderless contagious desires of the crowd. That is to say, its momentum was more readily related to local neighbourhood contaminations of rage than it was an orchestrated communication strategy. The English Riots were a somewhat perverted arrangement of antagonism and consumer desire. Yet this widespread contagion was similarly steered without a guiding hand. Indeed, both these events signal the return of a sometimes brutal crowd contagion that outspreads many protest movements endeavouring to increase their number by tapping into the virality of social media.

The Desire-Events of Revolutionary Contagion

Of course rebellions and riots are events boosted by communications, but it is not simply the technology that propagates the event. The network is “the relationality of that which it distributes . . . the passing-on of the event.” Be it word of mouth, telegraph, television or computer networks, it is the networkability of the event itself that opens up a space ready for the repetition of further events. The vital force required for the movability of the event comes from the rare intensity of a desire-event: the immolation of a street vendor or the fatal shooting of an unarmed gang suspect, for example. What spreads out from these shock events is felt at the visceral level of affective social encounter. The repetition of contaminating affects radiate reciprocal feelings, like anger, to a point where the thrust of collective desire builds into an effervescence of hormone and sentiment fit to burst. These are rare events because it would seem that most contagions eventually peter out or are rendered docile by outside forces. Some though build up into much bigger assemblages of desire with a capacity to spread further. Desire-events can in such cases follow a deadly line of flight whereby participants are prepared to die to satisfy their needs and wants.

There is nothing new in this event reading of social uprising. Indeed, aside from the recent kafuffle surrounding social media it is worth noting the early scepticisms of nineteenth century social contagion theory. Such events are exceptional, Gabriel Tarde claimed, even accidental. They are certainly not easy to predict, plan or steer. Furthermore, although now often regarded as a proto-network thinker, Tarde regarded most imitative outbreaks to be downward rather than democratically distributed movements. They were in the main aristocratic contagions – outbreaks of religious manias, patriotism, racism, and the like. Social examples flowed downward from a “superior” model to an “inferior” imitator. Conformity, obedience and a neurotic devotional fascination for those in power were generally the laws of imitation for the subjugated class. It is this descending flow of desire and social influence that magnetizes the social medium so that everyone infected passes on, from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, the example set from on high. Only on very rare occasions do the downward movements of such social terracing reverse like water flowing uphill. Democratic contagion occurs only when the movement down the scale becomes exhausted and is transformed into an inverse movement. That is, when “millions of men collectively fascinate and tyrannize over their quondam mediums.”

From his unique intellectual vantage point at the dawn of industry capitalism Tarde also observed a shift from older social assemblages, namely crowds, to new mediated social arrangements he called publics. Unlike crowds, who like animal societies required physical proximity in order to make psychic connections, publics were newly animated and dispersed by newspapers, railways, telegraphs and telephone networks. This made psychic connection possible without the need for closeness. The potential to spread new ideas was astonishing. However, by freeing up of the collective psychology from its corporal choreography, the publics’ capacity to protest was, Tarde argued, decidedly muted.

lord-rothermere-and-hitler — The press baron and the dictator

Certainly, Tarde did not see mediated connectivity as a way to escape the notion of an easily led crowd. On the contrary, Tarde regarded crowds to be without leaders, and as the nearness of their neighbourhoods diminished, and mediation increased, they became more open to persuasion from on high. Yes, the crowd was more brutal and had something of the animal about it, but publics were a passive and powerless social condition. That is to say, while the crowd leads its chief, publics are inspired by a controlling action-at-a-distance. Tarde recognized early on, as such, how the new media primes its products like a honey pot, setting up a mutual selection process whereby public opinion is dependent on a pandering to known prejudices and passions. By way of the flattery of their audiences, the press barons took hold of publics, dividing them up into several publics, making them evermore docile and credulous, and easily directed. In contrast, the crowd was to be feared.