The Digital Crowd

Abstract

Although digital technologies are implicated in intrusive surveillance and social fragmentation, their widespread uses in recent political protests demonstrate their potentials to support intense forms of collective life. Building on Mark Hansen’s new-media philosophy, this paper explores digital crowds as an intensified form of a contemporary phenomenon: the intertwinement of digital media with social life. Enveloped in technospheres of data-rich devices, the digital crowd forms hybrids with its environment of distributed digital intelligence, what Hansen conceptualizes as System-Environment Hybrids. Sampling the visible trace of such SEHs on Instagram, the article posits that their impacts on crowd formations signal a distinct form of collective life. It argues that the hybrid intensifies the affect and de-individuation processes of conventional pre-digital crowds, and extends such effects well beyond crowd events into persistent online environments of insatiable exchange. The paper speculates that intensified and persistent affect transform the emotional geography of the city.

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