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Collective Expressions
by Louise Jolly| Brighton, UK
Monday, 15 November 2010
tags: brand worlds, clients & brands, culture, emergence, europe
Crowds are everywhere at the moment. Spontaneous gatherings are spreading like wildfire across advertising, cultural events, and publishing.
With social networking on the rise, there’s an obvious reason for communications companies to take an interest in the crowd. The rapid spread of viral sharing has found expression in the ‘flash mob’ genre famously adopted by T-Mobile in the UK, with the brand’s Liverpool Street station mass dance. Sony Ericsson was quick to follow with its mass procession of people on space hoppers.
It’s not just happening in the communications sector. More widely, crowds are now seen as sources of spontaneous expression, intelligence, and creativity.
For instance, The Wisdom of Crowds, a pop-sociology book by James Surowiecki, talks about how large groups of people, by providing a mass aggregate of opinion, ‘know’ more than individuals ever can.
And ‘meaning in numbers’ is even extending to the domain of personal care — previously the territory of the isolated beauty-seeker gazing in her mirror. An example is Vaseline’s global platform ‘Your skin is amazing’, with its ads [detail below] featuring hundreds of bodies intertwined into a ‘sea of skin’.
Bringing collective expression into the domain of skincare represents a decisive shift in the way we imagine the body. For Vaseline, skin is now to be valued and loved as part of our ‘common wealth’ — a shared human treasure, rather than an individually-owned object of display and pride.
On the British cultural scene, the rising popularity of summer music festivals also demonstrates the new value placed on collective congregation and shared expression. This summer’s Big Chill music and arts festival was attended by Spencer Tunick, the photographer of vast gatherings of naked bodies — who took a panoramic shot of massed naked festival-goers. The crowd created and constructed within the bigger crowd of the festival — it would be hard to find a clearer expression of the theme at work.
Spencer Tunick’s panoramas of mass nakedness and Vaseline’s ‘sea of skin’ seem to be saying something very similar: forget the age of the ‘private’, and of individual discrimination — we’re now in an era when collective expression carries more weight. The theme of nakedness only adds to the implicit message: it’s time to strip away the illusions of individuality and separateness, and join in a shared humanity.
It takes us a long way from the 20th-century critical-modernist idea that the ‘mass’ was necessarily inert, passive, and stupid. Within this framework, intelligence or creativity lay with the ‘one’, or the small cabal: outsiders who used the margins to probe what was really going on.
But is the celebration of the crowd really such a radical departure — or does it simply reflect a new humanism? In a sense, rather than dispersing the ‘unified subject’ so heavily criticised in academia, the crowd revives it in a many-headed form.
It’s true that the idea of humanity produced in the Vaseline campaign and the flash mob genre asks us to ascribe creativity, art, and expression to the many rather than to the lone genius. The underlying narcissism, though, remains the same, constructing humanity as a collective superstar, with powers and qualities worthy of constant marvelling.
22 November 2010 at 10:29 pm
Malcolm Evans says:
The “illusions of individuality and separateness” versus “shared humanity” viewed as intelligent, creative, no longer the “inert, passive and stupid” mass. Whatever the factors problematising this opposition it undoubtedly expresses an ideological shift in progress, from individualism to the priority of the collective, in significant sections of the population in Europe and U.S. since the onset of the ongoing financial crunch. Earlier this year Slavoj Zizek, in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce expressed some dismay that politicians and media seemed to have pulled off an astonishing sleight of hand in saving the world for neoliberal individualism and persuading the mass to pick up the tab for the excesses of the bankers. But the collective response is by no means over yet. Anyone in doubt about this might want to view Eric Cantona’s call to revolution – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Uop5R7E314
By 10th December 2010 this may appear as innocuous as the threat of the Y2K bug. But Y2K was a one-off while Cantona’s analysis and advice that we all take our money out of the banks on 7th December 2010 doesn’t sound like the end of anything (or even the beginning) but rather a symptom of something in progress, possibly at this point about half way to the middle. Exciting in some ways – a kind of comeuppance for people who have it coming? And quite terrifying in others – wouldn’t these people include some if not all of us? It has already been suggested that Cantona himself would need a large collection of Louis Vuitton trunks to take his own cash home with him. But watch him and listen to him. It’s not that easy to dismiss. And it’s certainly not unknown, historically, for people to put their principles and the collective good before their self-interest. The times and places where that wasn’t the case may, indeed, be pretty few and far between.
21 November 2010 at 7:53 pm
TH says:
1. Interestingly, we credit an individual, Mr. Tunick, with expressing and symbolizing collectivity.
2. A couple counterpoints or “downsides” to the expanded gnosis and expression that collectivity offers:
a. The Lowest Common Denominator: current can only run through a circuit as fast as its node of greatest resistance. Reactions have rate-limiting steps.
b. Sometimes the characteristics that emerge from the sum of the parts are rather antithetical to human elevation/celebration, etc., e.g., The Lord of the Flies, WWII, et al.
Marketing, politics, and other arenas, are of course quick to exploit these.
With narcissism, for instance, even if the collective is not overtly embodying or focused on a “negative,” an outside entity such as a corporation can exploit it if there is even one “node” for which it is not a component.
16 November 2010 at 3:05 pm
Hamsini Shivakumar says:
Superb analysis and well spotted – the shift from celebrating the individual to celebrating the collective and yet, it being marketing, the underlying narcissm has to remain.
15 November 2010 at 2:32 pm
Josh Glenn says:
Great points! Another code one can’t help noticing in the Vaseline campaign is “feral nudity” — a kind of love/hate response to an advanced industrial civilization that demands of us that we conform to our technologies by becoming more machine-like. The irony being that, nowadays, conforming to our technologies doesn’t mean becoming machine-like but network-like — and the ectstatic crowd members we see in these examples do remind us of so many nodes in a network.