Perhaps it’s just as well that I’m stepping away from social media for a spell. From Kaitlyn Tiffany in The Atlantic ($), the war in Ukraine has unleashed a phenomenon that predates the Internet, but has found a new venue there:
…the behavior on display is, if nothing else, a product of a lack of sense. It’s the agitated, aimless buzzing of the type of crowd that gathers in the aftermath of some bewildering catastrophe. Social scientists have a name for this mode of chaos: They call it ‘milling.’…
The word comes from the mid-20th-century American sociologist Herbert Blumer, who was interested in the process by which crowds converge, during moments of uncertainty and restlessness, on common attitudes and actions. As people mill about the public square, those nearby will be drawn into their behavior, Blumer wrote in 1939. ‘The primary effect of milling is to make the individuals more sensitive and responsive to one another, so that they become increasingly preoccupied with one another and decreasingly responsive to ordinary objects of stimulation.’ …
We’re emoting, lecturing, correcting, praising, and debunking. We’re offering up dumb stuff that immediately gets swatted down. (We’re getting ‘ratioed,’ as it’s called on Twitter.) We’re being aimless and embarrassing and loud and responding to each other’s weird behavior. ‘People are kind of struggling to figure out appropriate ways of responding to this really uncertain situation,’ Timothy Recuber, an assistant sociology professor at Smith College, told me. …
After a crowd gets done with milling, Blumer theorized, it moves on to doing things—things that can be ‘strange, forbidding, and sometimes atrocious.’ Later scholars pointed out that milling crowds can also end up engaging in not-so-terrifying behaviors, and that individuals do not usually lose all control of their faculties in the face of a disaster. But the idea that milling is a first response to horrifying or confusing situations has indeed held up.