This essay proposes that we ‘think data’ with a complex legacy of work, once disavowed and now resurgent in social theory, on crowd formations. I propose this move because social media platforms’ mobilization of data – the extractions, ever‐shifting reaggregations, and micro‐targeting, on the one hand, and our engagements, re‐tweets, acts of sharing, and production of virality, on the other – has fuelled such anxious concern about the very things that animated much crowd theory in the first place. Key among these concerns are the force of emotional contagion and the threat of social dissolution; the composition of ‘the social’ by elements that well exceed the human; and pressing questions about the media through which energetic forces travel, often with lightning speed. What questions might be enabled by attending to the resonance between crowd theory's ‘anti‐liberal’ preoccupations and contemporary concerns over how social media platforms crowd us?

中文翻译：

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从联系到传染

这篇文章提出，我们应该以复杂的工作遗留来“思考数据”，这些遗留工作一旦被拒绝，现在在社会理论上又重新兴起了关于人群形成的思想。我之所以提出这一举措，是因为社交媒体平台的数据动员–一方面是提取，不断变化的重新聚合和微观定位，另一方面是我们在社交媒体平台上的参与，转发，共享行为和病毒式传播。其他–加剧了人们对一开始充斥着众多人群理论的事情的担忧。这些担忧中的关键是情绪感染的力量和社会解体的威胁；超越人类的要素构成的“社会”；以及有关能量不断传播的媒体的紧迫问题，这些媒体通常以迅雷不及掩耳之势。