Crowds and Publics

Crowds and Publics, as theorized in this single occurrence, names the classical sociological distinction between two modes of collective formation: the assembled, co-present crowd (associated with contagion, loss of individual interiority, and affective fusion) and the dispersed, mediated public (associated with rational deliberation, opinion formation, and individuated participation). The theoretical move of the passage is to argue that this distinction, long treated as foundational to mass psychology and democratic theory alike, has been structurally undermined by networked communication technologies. Mobile devices and networked platforms so thoroughly interpenetrate the co-present crowd and the absent public that neither pole retains its classical integrity. The individual who is physically assembled in a crowd remains simultaneously plugged into remote networks of opinion and address; the dispersed public member is simultaneously entangled in the affective intensities normally attributed to crowd behavior. The result is not a synthesis of the two terms but their mutual dissolution into what the author calls "virtualization."

This collapse is not merely technological but ideological in the Lacanian sense: the classical crowd/public binary had functioned as a structuring opposition that located the subject in one of two distinct social spaces, each with its own logic of subject-formation. Networked individualism scrambles this topology. Rather than a subject positioned by the crowd or by the public, what emerges is a "networked individual" who occupies both positions simultaneously and indiscernibly — a figure whose interiority and exteriority are continuously co-produced by the same devices. The structural gaps that once organized these two modes of collective life narrow, in the passage's formulation, "toward indiscernibility," which is to say toward a condition in which the distinction no longer functions as a symbolic anchor for subject-positioning.

In the source samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, this concept appears at a late argumentative moment (p. 307) where the book's historical narrative of everyday talk arrives at the present conjuncture of networked communication. Crowds and Publics functions as the prior conceptual opposition that the book's other novel concepts — Networked Individual, Virtualization, Individualization — are positioned against and meant to supersede. It is not developed as a concept in its own right but rather as the classical foil whose structural collapse generates the book's diagnostic claims about contemporary talk.

In relation to the cross-referenced canonicals, the concept engages most directly with Singularity and Ideology. The classical crowd/public binary had implied a theory of subject-formation: the crowd threatens singularity by dissolving the individual into affective fusion, while the public preserves (or produces) a form of individuated, deliberating subject. The book's argument that this binary collapses into indiscernibility implies that the structural condition for producing singularity — the gap between crowd and public — is itself being eroded. This connects to the ideological register: ideology, as defined via Lacan and Žižek in the corpus, requires structural non-knowledge and fantasmatic supplements to sustain social reality. The virtualization of the crowd/public distinction could be read as a new ideological operation in which the fantasy of autonomous individual opinion (the public) is maintained even as its structural basis — separation from crowd affect — disappears. Individualization and Networked Individual name the positive subject-form that fills the void left by this collapsed distinction, while Virtualization names the process of collapse itself.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.307)

With every turn of the super-connected screw, the structural gaps between crowd culture and public culture narrow toward indiscernibility.

The phrase "structural gaps" is theoretically loaded because it frames the crowd/public distinction not as a matter of empirical degree but as a structural opposition — one whose erosion is therefore not gradual blending but a collapse of the very categories' organizing function; "toward indiscernibility" then specifies that what is at stake is not mere similarity but the loss of the differential that made the distinction legible and operative in the first place.