![]() Into the anxious and frenetic early 2010s it rolled-that cheerful ![]() On Instagram stepping away from its foundational retro aesthetic: "When it debuted, Instagram Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press,ġ991), 111. The paper speculates that intensified and persistent affect transform the emotional geography of the city. It argues that the hybrid intensifies the affect and de-individuation processes of conventional pre-digital crowds, and extends such effects well beyond crowd events into persistent online environments of insatiable exchange. Sampling the visible trace of such SEHs on Instagram, the article posits that their impacts on crowd formations signal a distinct form of collective life. Enveloped in technospheres of data-rich devices, the digital crowd forms hybrids with its environment of distributed digital intelligence, what Hansen conceptualizes as System-Environment Hybrids. Building on Mark Hansen’s new-media philosophy, this paper explores digital crowds as an intensified form of a contemporary phenomenon: the intertwinement of digital media with social life. Although digital technologies are implicated in intrusive surveillance and social fragmentation, their widespread uses in recent political protests demonstrate their potentials to support intense forms of collective life.
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