The Crowds Seminar represents the capstone event of the Stanford Humanities Lab Crowds project: a large-scale research project initiated in 2000 and supported since 2002 by the Seaver Institute, involving scholars from a wide array of humanities and social sciences disciplines, dedicated to exploring the role of human multitudes in modern life. The project outputs are three-fold: a multiauthor, print-digital hybrid volume entitled Crowds, edited by Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, forthcoming in 2006 with Stanford University Press; Revolutionary Tides, an exhibition of over 120 political posters hosted by the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford and The Wolfsonian-FIU in Miami; and a project website (http://crowds.stanford.edu/) which supports both.

Whereas the book, exhibition, and website are historical in focus, the Crowds Seminar will be concerned with the present and future of crowds. Speculative in character, it will assume the form of an open conversation among artists, political activists, humanities scholars, and social scientists to be recorded for streaming on the Crowds website.

The seminar opens with a keynote talk by James Surowiecki, New Yorker business columnist and author of The Wisdom of Crowds (2004). It closes with a second keynote, by Howard Rheingold, author of numerous influential books, including Smart Mobs (2002), after which there will be a concluding discussion among seminar participants. The bulk of the seminar will consist in open discussion, led on Saturday by three panels of presenters.

The nature of the seminar.

Presentations and the seminar discussion will relate key concerns (research-based, scientific, cultural, social and/or political) in various fields of activity to the topic of the present and future role of public assemblies,

Both will address such questions as:

• if modernity was “the era of crowds,” is the present still an era in which crowding, crowds or mass assemblies play a determining role in culture, economics, politics, architecture, or processes of social change?
• how much difference does it make whether assemblies assume physical or virtual forms, or whether they are normal or exceptional features of everyday life?
• to what degree is your base assumption that group behavior is either fundamentally or tendentially rational or irrational?
• how does the proliferation of electronic media relate to the present and future prospects of crowds?
• are one’s views regarding the above questions powerfully conditioned by specific historical precedents, examples, or experiences?

In addressing such questions, the seminar will be engaging with the heuristic hypotheses with which the Crowds project was launched in 2000. Namely:

• that the era of popular sovereignty, industrialization, and urbanization saw the rise of a constellation of new forms of mass assembly and collective social action that reached their apogee in the first half of the twentieth century;
• that these forms began to attenuate gradually in the second half of the century, particularly in the wake of the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, due to the proliferation and ever increasing prevalence of virtual or media-based forms of “assembly” over physical assemblies in postindustrial societies, as well as to long-term trends promoting economic decentralization, suburban sprawl, increased mobility, and political disengagement; and
• that this shift, rather than abolishing the equation between crowds and modernity, has reshaped it, channeling experiences of crowding in postindustrial societies into certain limited domains of civic and electoral ritual, entertainment, and leisure, while assigning to large-scale mass political actions a fallback function restricted to times of exception (war, acute social conflicts, and the like).

The initial project thesis was less one of rupture, thus, than of a process of specialization whose ultimate outcome is a progressive reduction of the role of physical crowds to that of an icon that circulates within a political economy characterized by the coexistence of media aggregation and bodily disaggregation. The icon in question is subject to a variety of uses and appropriations; its currency is sustained by contemporary resurgences of the prior history of marches, rallies, riots, and assemblies. It tends, however, to appear under an ever deepening patina of otherness and anachronism: “otherness” inasmuch as the face of contemporary multitudes has increasingly become a foreign face associated with conflicts in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa relayed into first-world living rooms and bedrooms via electronic media; “anachronism” to the degree that, even in the developing world, contemporary mass actions appear to have become ever more “citational”—they quote, sometimes in a nostalgic key, from a prior, now irrecuperable heroic era of crowds—or designed for media audiences in remote locations—hence the prevalence of banners in English in non-Anglophone settings. The result is a decoupling of the once solid equation between crowds and contemporaneity.

Participant information.

Additional information for seminar participants, including a provisional program, is available here.