The culture of engagement

The revolt of the mobs

By Max Bruinsma

Ever since the invention of ‘the masses’, between Karl Marx’s ‘Kommunistisches Manifest’ and José Ortega y Gasset’s ‘La rebelión de las masas’, we have struggled with the tension between the forces of diversity and uniformity, which govern the cultural dynamics of large groups of people. The masses are at once a formless blob with only the crudest outline of an identity (‘hunger’, ‘unemployment’, ‘anger’), and a vast collective of overlapping individual stories and demands. This is what makes them so rich in potential for collective action and so dangerous for a reigning elite, which discovers that the masses in fact consist of individuals with shared issues.

Design solved part of the problem in terms of crowd control: it caters to the common denominator of individual needs and desires. In product design for mass markets this, let us say appeasing strategy, has resulted in the discipline of ergonomics, or human factors engineering, which sees ‘humans’ as a statistical average, as abstract model. An ergonomically well designed chair fits everybody of a certain age and size in general — and perhaps only one person in particular. In advertising, this approach has given rise to the definition of ‘target groups’: housewives, teenagers, Young Urban Professionals (YUPs). All of this ‘mediating’ — in the literal sense of ‘middling’ — amounts to a variation of the famous saying about deception: you can mediate all the people some of the time, and some people all the time, but not all of the people all the time.

Erik Adigard

This situation has changed now. Technically, even within the parameters of economically viable mass production, it is possible to make a million different chairs for a million differently built individuals. Technically it is possible to spam everyone online all the time. So, where does this brave new world of personalization lead us? Cultural pessimists point to the  darker sides of direct marketing and consumer profiling, but these are not the only forces to profit from the huge leap forward in media technology and networks. On the positive side, there are indications that the masses are finally learning to speak for themselves. Obviously, the great breakthrough here is the internet, with its potential for a seamless range of media address between mass-communication and what is now called ‘P2P’, peer to peer exchange. Moreover, the ‘information highway’ puts this potential in the hands of each and every individual with access to a computer and the internet, of which there are about a billion today. The results are dramatic, from economical, social, political and cultural perspectives: the masses talk back — as individuals. In countless blogs and homepages, in a host of forums and online communities, via photo exchange sites such as Flicker, via SMS and podcast — by all media available.

anonymous

There has grown a completely new mass medium, which in fact is neither ‘mass’ nor even a medium in the old meanings of those words. “Peer to Peer” is an oddly old-fashioned way of describing something radically new: the fact that everyone is everybody else’s potential ‘peer’, or equal, instead of being hierarchically linked through the traditional institutionalized mediating networks. In a sense, this explosion of mediating potential obliterates the very essence of the word mediation, by filtering out the mediating institutions: governments, corporations, publishers, journalists, editors, anchor persons — and designers. Anyone with a UMTS phone equipped with a camera now is, maybe not practically, but certainly in principle all of the above.

Maybe we should find a new word for this new kind of mediation: mobilism. And not in the sense it has often been used, as synonym for ‘mobility’, but as a new technology which has the potential of becoming a new culture. The emancipatory potential of the current mobile communications media for the once voiceless masses is as underestimated as the dangers of uncontrollable access to these same media by the destructive forces in the world (read ‘terrorists’ or ‘copyright violators’) are emphasized by the powers that be. In both fields we can quote the words of Ronald Reagan: you ain’t seen nothing yet.

 DHZ23

The other

In recent post-modern philosophy, thinkers like Lyotard and Derrida stipulated that the role of interchange, or interaction, is crucial to any incidence of meaning. There is no absolute truth, only occurrences of shared or opposed interpretations. Occurrences; plural and concurrently. This insight became an important argument in the analysis of communication: meaning is established interactively, not defined unilaterally. This again means that there can be no question of ‘meaning’ without ‘the other’, i.e. without context. In other words, there is no single or privileged principle of explanation or interpretation. There is ‘difference’.

This may look rather theoretical, but in fact it had considerable practical consequences — at least in the West, with its individualized cultures. It shifted the focus of communication from analyzing and understanding messages as ‘singular expressions’ to reading them as the sediments of a multiplicity of sources. The difference between mention of ‘a terrorist attack’ and ‘an action by freedom fighters’ lies not in the facts both refer to, but in the origin of the message. The wording reflects context — the message is an interpretation, not a fact.

 James Victore

For design, this insight has deep consequences. It changes the notion of design as organizer of facts to that of generator of occurrences. In other words, design cannot be seen anymore as ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’, but must be understood as ‘the sediment of interpretations’. I am using the word ‘sediment’ here to evoke the informed look of the geologist to a formation of ancient rock. To the rest of us, it looks like any old cliff, but the geologist sees in it the result of eons of physical processes, of a specific dynamics of nature. In our information culture, we are all geologists of meaning; we read layers of context and process into the information landscape before us — we read in it the specific dynamics of culture. Or so we should, lest we become unwitting factors of it, mindless components of the sediment.

Inescapable engagement

This is where designers and the public at large face a shared challenge, that of redefining the role of the masses and the way they communicate as individuals. Let’s not forget that ‘the masses’ were once synonym for ‘the others’ in the Sartrian sense*: the ‘others’, hell to the ruling classes. The pejorative term for this view to ‘les autres’ is ‘the mob’, this frighteningly faceless collective with no binding force other than to violently uproot the world as we know it. The barbarians. The vandals. The iconoclasts. The others. Today, the word ‘mob’ is often used in a more positive vein, as short for ‘mobile activists’. Anti- or ‘other-globalists’ can be seen as vandals, but also as loose collectives of people distributed worldwide and combining forces to make a difference in the discourses and practices of global trade, economy and development by using any media necessary. They can ’mob’ because of the networks and technologies that facilitate their instant communication. In the words of designer Erik Adigard: “The ‘mob’ is not just people who have figured out how to rally, it is also the mob of devices that have figured out how to network (camera + phone + text + internet).” The single most discerning aspect which marks the difference between the old definition of ‘the masses’ as being characterized by one simple common denominator, and the nature of the new ‘mobs’ is the fact that they are not masses, but multiplicities: temporary aggregates of occurrences, temporarily networked. In other words, they represent ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ in critical dialogue with the official common denominators.

 Mieke Gerritzen

Present mobs look more like hypertexts than like manifestos. They consist as much of linked resources, cross-referenced information and situatively shared goals than of people who are collectively doing things at the same time in the same place. Aristotle’s ‘unity of time, place and action’, which has long been the first commandment of western theatre, is rapidly being replaced by a theatre of distributed acts. The binding force here is the narrative which connects ‘times, places and actions’ (plural). Today’s masses, or mobs, engage with multiple narratives, not as passive serial readers, but as active participants. They want to alter or add to the story. They want to be part of it.

Appeasing strategies, i.e. ‘top-down’ approaches, do not work here, neither in politics nor in design. The mob is interested in participation, not in solace. They engage in the themes and causes of their choice as actors, not as mere consumers. Collectively, they contribute to an ever expanding mosaic of interventions, as authors, editors, distributors and designers of messages, verbal and visual. If the new condition of the ‘masses’ is engagement with today’s informal information networks, then the best communication design can do is to focus on the conditions which can foster these networks. A lot of the ‘design’ is in fact being done by the mob themselves; they write in visual languages, in icons and pictograms and images and samples. No question of ‘good design’ arises here — what counts is the effectiveness and reach of visual statements in participatory and interactive communication networks.

Apart from temporarily ‘freezing’ occurrences within this social and cultural  dynamics — which is what most communication design still does —, there is a need for design for interaction. Any communication design today is part of a mob, simply because it participates in today’s culture of networked exchanges, if only as rip-off. As such, its effectiveness resides not so much it its authorial qualities as ‘good design’, but in its quotability. In its capacity of becoming part of the vast hypertext of cultural exchanges that make up ‘mobilism’. To quote Erik Adigard once more: “There is more concurrency, more distribution and more interdependency. My view on Mobilism encompasses all these notions and yet avoids notions of intent or authorship, to focus  instead on the context. Because that is the one thing that is transforming our lives perhaps for ever.”

* Jean Paul Sartre: “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” (Hell, that’s the others), in Huis clos, 1944