By Jonathan Wynn

I like crowds. I remember
feeling emotionally overcome as part of the group when I was in the front row
at a Radiohead concert in Madison Square Garden or at the greatest
comeback in NFL history. Being caught
up in the moment, succumbing to the mass and losing a sense of one’s own
individualism was something sociologist Emile
Durkheim called collective
effervescence: the emotional energy binding a group and a person. He was
more interested in religious rituals, but I thought of this concept when
watching this YouTube video
of frenzied shoppers on Black Friday:

Thinking about the balance
between the needs of the individual and the wisdom of the collective sits at
the heart of sociology: Where does the self end and the society begin? Are
crowds orderly and productive or irrational and destructive? “The Crowd” can be
a pivot point for examining social life, and early sociologists like Durkheim, Georg Simmel and Robert Park all took
note of that. Philosopher Elias
Canetti called crowd mentality “collective contagion.”

Gustave LeBon (1896)
offered an early theory on this kind of deindividualization, believing crowds
made individuals irrational and emotional. Mob violence (a la the Salem Witch Trials or
sexual violence of the 2000
Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City)
could be examples of how the fervor of the crowd can draw seemingly reasonable
people into seeming irrational actions. Both examples, however, are not as
groundless as we may first think: the Salem Witch Trials and the events in
Central Park show how a crowd can echo existing forms of power and control.

The Black Friday crowds can
be similarly linked: In this case, these individual behaviors tied to our
overly consumerist society. Allison Pugh’s book Longing and Belonging provides a nuanced and thoughtful account of the
symbolic practices surrounding childhood and consumption, but the fever pitch
Black Friday shopping serves as a kind of flip-side to those more deliberate buying
practices. There’s something to focusing on the”meaning of things” but also
something to looking at the social action itself.

And to take that on, we could
focus on the positives of crowd formation and collective effervescence and not
just overtly negative examples, right? My dissertation research, on walking tours in New York City, highlighted how the tour group bonded, especially
when confronted by the occasional cranky local who cursed at the folks blocking
the sidewalk. My research on music festivals reinforced the collective warmth
of being a concertgoer, and there’s other
research on crowds and sports.

I imagine there are similar
feelings at religious pilgrimages (almost two million people flood the plain
surrounding the Hajj), or at protests like Occupy Wall Street, as they
congregate for a collective plea for government oversight and awareness of
economic inequality. (Elias Canetti, offering a typology of gatherings, would likely call the Hajj pilgrimage a ”Feast
Crowd,” Occupy a ”Reversal” or a “Prohibition Crowd,” and Black Friday Shoppers
as a ”Baiting Crowd.”)

There are critiques of
commercialism, mirroring the crowd formation as well. Bill Wasik, who is
credited for inventing the ”Flash Mob” –a kind of conscious, near-instant gathering, mostly
for the point of having a gathering—details
the origin of the term, which has both technological and shopping-related
foundations:

One blog
proprietor gave the concept a name—“flash mobs”—after a 1973
science-fiction short story, “Flash Crowd,” which deals with the unexpected
downside of cheap teleportation technology: packs of thrillseekers who beam
themselves in whenever a good time is going down. The story’s protagonist,
Jerryberry Jensen, is a TV journalist who inadvertently touches off a multiday
riot in a shopping mall, but eventually he clears his name by showing how technology was
to blame.

Flash Mobs indicate that new
technology can also be an answer: consider the hacker-collective of Anonymous, which marries the privacy and placelessness afforded
by technology with the power of a collectivity, or the Arab Spring, where
crowds gathered to protest government oppression fueled in part by advances in mobile technology. A different manifestation is Improv Everywhere, a
Flash Mob/performance art troupe. For this year’s Black Friday they organized a
prank to get

Photo courtesy of ImprovEverywhere.com

people to re-think consumerism. Their volunteer-
pranksters (they call themselves agents) campedoutside a dollar store in Manhattan as if they
were awaiting the latest iPod, and
stampeded in when the doors opened to the bemusement of passersby and the
dollar store workers. They’ve done other events in a grocery store
and Home Depots.
All of them make a scene, but they also can tweak the collective consciousness
on shopping, consciously or not.

In 1906 Sir Francis Galton
wanted to prove that the masses were relatively unintelligent but found they
can be, in fact, rather smart. He realized that all the little bits of
information individuals hold add to a group’s collective knowledge, increasing
the likelihood of the crowd’s intelligence. When asked a question, a collective
group has a stronger probability of getting the correct answer. James
Surowiecki, in The Wisdom of Crowds,
updates this group intelligence idea using the example of how the audience on
the TV Show Who Wants to be a
Millionaire? is correct 91% of the time.

So, there is a dual nature to
crowds. They might act emotionally, even dangerously, but they also have the
potential for collective intelligence. Crowds can be smart, politically savvy,
and effective too. Keep this in mind when you are at the mall shopping for gifts.