Twitter as a Tool of Mob Rule

I wasn't at the keynote at SXSW because I suspected that Zuckerman would not be a very interesting interview. He's well-known placidly toeing the Facebook company line. Apparently, I was wrong -- not about Zuckerman, who certainly didn't disappoint my expectations, but about the combination of Zuckerman and his interviewer Sarah Lacey. Many people who were at the keynote called it a "disaster" and a "train wreck."

Looking at video coverage of it, it doesn't really seem that bad, to me. But my friends say "you had to be there."

Why?

Well, I think this has to do with mob psychology, a phenomenon that tries to explain how mass movements happen, how otherwise reasonable, kind people can whip themselves up into a frenzy of ecstasy or rage.

When I was a history student at UC Berkeley, this phenomenon utterly fascinated me, and I tried to understand, form a historical perspective, how and why it happened, trying to piece together the data that set up situations like this. In both Japan and France (the two areas of enduring interest for me throughout my academic career) there were famous instances of mobs gone insane -- mobs of otherwise ordinary and decent citizens pulling people out of their homes to beat them, cut off their body parts, and parade them around the city. Outsiders (people who watched from their windows, for example) were utterly horrified; but those who participated were swept along by mob logic, if one can call it "logic" at all.

I don't believe that any of us are immune to the pressure of group action. And now I think we see from the Zuckerman keynote that technology creates its own special place where mob psychology can flourish. Those of us who have spent any time on forums already know this to be the case. But applications like Twitter can produce instant results, in real time. From Tim Leberecht's astute commentary on the incident:

Twittering (on Twitter and elsewhere) pushed people to act out; it accelerated interruption. People who did not like the way the interview was going had assurance that the crowd was with them; and it intensified those feelings. In traditional passive audience situations, for every person who acts out, the ratio of those who wanted to but didn't, is probably much higher. Instead, because people knew that not only the people sitting next to them, but also those in all four corners of the room had the same gripes--or pointed out new ones--many people acted out. As Lacy said, what we got was "Digg-style mob-rule." Essentially: Twittering lowers the threshold for lash-out.

Interesting. Tim goes on the suggest that the interview could have been saved if the interviewer had been following what was going on in the room; of course, in the olden days performers had direct feedback form the crowd's energy through other means -- body language, attention paid, in more extreme cases, applause or boos or other vocal signs of approbation/disapproval. I suppose now all those reactions are sublimated and streamed through the ether. One much tap into that to get a sense of where the mob is headed...

Comments

[Liz]

Sara Lacy was atrocious! That's the way I behave when I'm trying to let a man know I'm interested not conduct an interview. I've given facebook a try and I don't enjoy it. Twitter on the other hand, I adore for the reasons you mention here.

[eric]

i wasn't there either, but the audience WAS booing and groaning and heckling from what i understand. and i have to assume the body language cues were all there as well that she had lost the audience, and she made really poor attempts to gain their respect back.

twitter is just the latest conduit for the backchannel at conferences, following on IM and IRC. before that, it was whispering to the person/s next to you...if you have to wait until the beer bottles are breaking against the chicken wire, you might want to stay away from live audiences ;-)

btw, zuckerBERG i think.

lacy

[Alice Lee]

If you have not heard them before, WNYC/NPR's Radio Lab has had a couple shows that talked about mobs (although usually in the context of something else). The Musical Language episode talks about the mob after a performance of a piece by Stravinsky, and the War of the Worlds episode has a mob in Brazil after a performance of the radio drama. The latter is not available online yet but I highly recommend the show.