Urban Crowds, Mediated Publics and Global Masses

Abstract

While crowds were regarded by many nineteenth-century authors as exceptional, unknown creatures attacking civilization from the outside, early twentieth-century sociologists increasingly focused on the more familiar yet, for some reasons, no less uncanny figure of the mass. Whereas the perceived problem with crowds was their aggressiveness, masses were mainly charged with passiveness, shapelessness and anomy. Apparently, publics were more active producers of opinions, yet soon exposure, emotionality and cacophony and were attributed to them.