Tarde-The Public and The Crowd

Tarde published a paper in 1898 entitled "The Public and the Crowd". He argued that while the crowd was one of the oldest forms of human association, the public was a product of modern technological developments. Crowd members are copresent; publics are ohysically dispersed, given cohesion only by participant's awareness they share some idea. Since that awareness could not be attributed to proximate social interaction, another source was required. Tarde suggested one such source was the newspaper, itself the nineteenth-century product of the printing press, the railroad, and the telegraph. Thus, the form of social life Tarde called "the public" simply did not exist prior to the nineteenth century.

Tarde further argued that whereas individuals could simultaneously be part of several publics, they could participate in but one crowd at a time. Since crowds are comparatively limited in size, their influence may not extend beyond what participants and onlookers can see and hear. By comparison, publics are virtually unlimited in size and perhaps in the scope of their influence. But Tarde argued that the fundamental distinction between the crowd and the public was that interaction in the latter took the form of critical discussion. The result, Tarde suggested, is that publics yielded heterogeneity whereas crowds tended toward homogeneity.