written by Clark McPhail
shared by sean on August 20th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
This is the prologue to Clark McPhail’s underrecognized book The Myth of the Maddening Crowd. He is a sociologist who has been studying collective behavior since the 1970’s, when he filmed, analyzed, and choreographed some very analog simulations of crowd situations. (See: “Collective Locomotion as Collective Behavior“) In 1992, with another sociologist named Tucker and an American control system engineer, William T. Powers, McPhail developed a reasonably believable computer program to simulate group following behavior. (See related: “Artificial Life“)
McPhail writes in this prologue “My primary interests are the description and explanation of what two or more persons do together: cooperation, competition, and conflict” and although he doesn’t recognize the literary influence, Michel Serres describes the constantly shifting relationships between I’s and us in his amazing chapter of The Parasite called “Theory of the Quasi-Object.” Instead, McPhail had arrived at a cybernetic theory for collective behavior that emphasizes the individual’s goals while taking a whole century of “crowd theory” to task for mythologizing the effect of the group on the individual.