Mark Earls

Who would have thought a herd could moonwalk?

The acclaimed web theorist, Mark Earls, says that the death of Michael Jackson unleashed the extremes of collective action: mass mourning and sick jokes

issue 04 July 2009

‘All character is action’ goes the old Hollywood cliché — that is, we learn far more about people by how they behave than we do from what they tell us about themselves. Whatever else you think about the internet (for good or ill), it does two really important but significantly different things to allow us to pursue this study of homo sapiens: first, it allows us to connect with each other in ways and with a frequency unimaginable just a few years ago (and so amplifies our natural tendencies); and second, perhaps more significantly, it allows the curious to...

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