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From connection to contagion
Author(s) -
Hayden Cori
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9655.13482
Subject(s) - social media , emotional contagion , sociology , key (lock) , connection (principal bundle) , media studies , political science , computer science , social psychology , psychology , computer security , engineering , law , structural engineering
This essay proposes that we ‘think data’ with a complex legacy of work, once disavowed and now resurgent in social theory, on crowd formations. I propose this move because social media platforms’ mobilization of data – the extractions, ever‐shifting reaggregations, and micro‐targeting, on the one hand, and our engagements, re‐tweets, acts of sharing, and production of virality, on the other – has fuelled such anxious concern about the very things that animated much crowd theory in the first place. Key among these concerns are the force of emotional contagion and the threat of social dissolution; the composition of ‘the social’ by elements that well exceed the human; and pressing questions about the media through which energetic forces travel, often with lightning speed. What questions might be enabled by attending to the resonance between crowd theory's ‘anti‐liberal’ preoccupations and contemporary concerns over how social media platforms crowd us?