Crowding Around The Screen

Comment #2: "trying waaaaayyyy too hard.": One of the photographs from The Brooklyn Museum's "Click!" exhibit that received the most comments online.

Breaking: the concept of crowds is changing as a result of the Internet. Not incredibly shocking news, but what has emerged in the wake of Web 2.0 is an intricate society of different communities that “crowd” around different types of information. The way these communities identify themselves online can (and often do) differ radically from their “real life” personas, but the collective often remains easily identifiable on the Internet.

In “Spaciousness and Crowding,” Yi-Fu Tuan asks, “What constitutes crowding?” (59) While Yi-Fu Tuan covers the spatial aspects of "crowding," I started to think more about the "crowd" as a social entity in different spaces. The advent of the Internet has only further complicated the possible answers. Social networking sites such as the ubiquitous Facebook and its former, more juvenile counterpart MySpace (nevermind Friendster and the many previous incarnations), have translated day-to-day relationships to public pages, where information about events and groups is disseminated and introduces even more members to its “crowd.” Facebook has taken a tamer form than previous social networking sites, with a uniform design and meticulous privacy settings. The user’s ability to customize which “friends” can see particular aspects of their lives is more alienating than other facets of Internet “crowding.”

The other giant elephant in the Internet room is YouTube, which has begun to expand its own social networking features. The success of YouTube, however, has been based on large-scale word-of-mouth exchanges of information. Certain videos become “destinations” for crowds of millions of viewers to catch a glimpse of a clip from a TV show, a politician’s gaff, or a celebrity nip slip. Although these crowds do not exist in the same place, they occupy the same space and gain the same set of sensory information that can define a “crowd.”

I could go on. Message boards exist for every topic imaginable, from video games to parenting to neighborhood news. The nature of these boards varies according to content and audience. Commenting on news sites, blogs, and other Internet content has developed into a whole separate group of sub-cultures – Gawker commenters are snarky, TMZ and YouTube commenters are crass and vulgar, and Perez Hilton commenters are perhaps the most vapid and inane of the bunch. In fact, this very website attracts a distinct crowd in itself – of students, teachers, and maybe the occasional parent who keeps a close eye on his or her child.

The next step in mobilizing these new crowds has already begun. Obama expertly manipulated the masses in his 2008 campaign via Internet networking in a completely unprecedented fashion. Pitchfork Media, an exclusive music news site, has restructured their annual outdoor music festival opening to have users vote and determine each act’s set lists. Last year, the Brooklyn Museum hosted an exhibition called “Click!,” a “crowd-curated” exhibition of photography on the theme of “The Changing Faces of Brooklyn.” A lot of these shifts in mobilization have been attributed to a book called The Wisdom of Crowds, which I have not read but sounds like a good resource for understanding the way we think as a collective.