Concept
public versus crowd
Tarde’s distinction: a crowd is a gathering of bodies in which feeling spreads by contact; a public is physically dispersed, held together mentally, and formed through the newspaper.
In the first chapter of L’opinion et la foule (1901) Gabriel Tarde says that the words “public” and “crowd” are being confused, and separates them. A crowd, in his definition, is essentially a bundle of psychic contagions produced by physical contact; even where we speak of the “public” of a theatre it is in fact a crowd that is meant. A public is “a purely spiritual collectivity”: people who are physically separate and whose cohesion is entirely mental. Tarde says this second kind has been growing since the invention of printing, that the psychology of crowds has been written, and that it is now the turn of the psychology of the public.
The maker of the public, according to Tarde, is the newspaper: in his own example, in regions of France where nobody has ever seen a Jew, hostility to Jews nonetheless flourishes because people read newspapers that write in that vein. An editor’s note also says that his separation of crowd and public anticipates writers such as Herbert Blumer.
The distinction is still useful: the question whether a wave of anger spreads by contact or by shared reading and sharing separates the models of Le Bon and Tarde.
Example
(Hypothetical example.) The stand at a derby match is a crowd; people all over the country who read the same columnist and have never seen one another are a public.