Abstractions, Expressions and Online Collectives

Groups of people or collectives, possess a number of interesting properties even in the online world. While there are associated with positive connotations like "The Wisdom of the Crowd," not all collectives are wise. In this paper, we analyze collectives in terms of two cognitive dimensions called abstraction and expression. Based on the extent of "coagulation" of abstractions and expressions in the collective, we identify four extreme points that we call: crowds, herds, mobs and gangs respectively. We also propose and compare two computational models to score collectives along the above characterization.