In The Crowd by Gustave Le Bon, one of the first psychological enquiries into crowd behavior, the author says that “in crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated.” Le Bon also says that the effect of a crowd will be:
- To make the individual feel invincible, allowing he/she to yield to instincts which if alone may have been “kept under restraint.”
- To make the individual submit to the contagion of the crowd, sacrificing personal interest for the collective interest of the crowd.
To put this in common language, we get caught up in the excitement, we feel deep emotions, and we “go along with the crowd.” You’ve felt this. I’ve felt this. It’s often visceral and primitive. Very few, if any, of us are immune to the effects of crowd behavior.
Alvin Toffler in Powershift thought that the “crowd” was the first mass medium, sending messages from the “ruled” to the “ruler.” We can apply that model to the situation of social media’s use in everyday people communicating with the companies that make the goods and services the people buy. Toffler also thought that in addition to the messages that crowds sent, the size of the crowd was also a message in that it communicated the importance of the message. Message quality and quantity are important. But in addition to the size of the crowd sending a message to the ruler, the size of the crowd also sent a message to the “ruled.” Toffler says that message to the ruled is, “You are not alone.” This is the factor of invincibility that Le Bon proposed.
So is social media a crowd? Is the influence that social media brings upon a company that of “mob rule?” I’ll take a closer look in a later post.
