Opinion | Crowds, Contagion, And The Feed That Never Lets A Protest Cool Down

From Jantar Mantar to millions of phone screens, the CJP protests show how crowds, algorithms and doomscrolling shape emotions, outrage and political polarisation

By the end of July, the scenes from Delhi had established a routine pattern, with tear gas being used against barricades, Sonam Wangchuk being lifted onto a stretcher during his hunger strike, and students chanting outside Parliament. Within an hour, the same footage was being looped on a million phones, the captions being generated not by a reporter but by an algorithm that determined who saw it next.

The Cockroach Janta Party’s protests over the leak of the NEET exam paper eventually led to the education minister resigning, a move the movement claims as evidence that it had been successful. But there is still another story beneath the political one, concerning the effect that a protest of this kind has on our mental health, whether that mind is present in the crowd or is merely scrolling through it from a hostel room three states away.

'Proud Of Railways, Want To Be Proud Of Govt...': Why Sonam Wangchuk Took Vande Bharat

Jharkhand Paper Leak: Devendra Mahato Drinks Water Amid Hunger Strike After Sonam Wangchuk's Appeal

'We Are A Movement': CJP's Dipke Says They're Not Starting A Party, Will Act As Pressure Group

Sonam Wangchuk Praises Centre Over Anti-Paper Leak Bill Days After Ending Hunger Strike: ‘Happy That…’

For most of the past century, crowd psychology has been mistaken. Gustave Le Bon, a 19th-century French social psychologist, described crowds in his 1895 work as settings in which the individual self disappears and is replaced by irrational, impulsive behaviour, a view that still shapes popular understanding of crowds. On the other hand, Steve Reicher, a British social psychologist, has spent many years refuting this by examining real-life events, including the 1990 Poll Tax riots in London. He found the opposite to be true: when people are in a crowd, they do not lose their individuality, instead they exchange it for a common identity, one which includes its own rules as to what is considered fair.

A student at Jantar Mantar has not become wild; rather, they have taken on the perceived identity of a wronged generation, and this identity has its own logic for responding. This is also the reason why heavy policing has a particular way of making things worse. Reicher discovered that when force is applied indiscriminately to a crowd, it rarely succeeds in dispersing it; instead causing the neutral and mixed group to become angrier and more united, since everyone in it now has the same mental experience of being treated unjustly in the same way, no matter what they were actually doing.

Protesters were injured........

© News18