How Online Mobs Act Like Flocks Of Birds

When we spoke with Ruby Justice Thelot, cyber-ethnographer and adjunct professor of design and media theory at NYU, he referenced his now-published piece co-written with Rue Yi for Folklore, The Balkanization & Babelification of the Internet, when he told us: “It’s wonderful as a culture, as a species, to share reality. But I think we’re approa... See more

If it is true that the era of collective experimentation online was short lived, then the next interesting question is why. One hypothesis that I’m intrigued with is rooted less in technological changes and more in social ones. Shirky’s dictum that revolutions start from behavioral change rather than from technological change helps us also explain ... See more

This was the overwhelming lesson of the early internet. It works because it mirrors the social interaction of real life, where social groups exclude people who don’t fit in. And it works because it distributes the task of policing the internet to a vast number of volunteers, who provide the free labor of keeping forums fun, because to them maintai

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