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Introduction

From the Era of the Crowd to the Psychographic Turn
Authors: Megan Faragher;
Abstract

Abstract After staging the stakes of the mid-century turn towards psychography in W.H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen,” the Introduction provides a pre-history of “psychography,” a term coined in the Victorian Era to describe a series of disparate practices of recording and materializing individual psychology. These practices—including telepathic communication, automatic writing, and the literary methods of Stracheyan psychobiography—demonstrate “mind-writing” as an emergent literary concern long before the invention of modern polling. Even in this protean stage of psychography, writers worried these new practices might empower malignant actors to weaponize psychographic power against the nation. Invoking Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an exemplar of this phenomenon, I highlight that the vampire frightens not only because he will feed on London’s “teeming millions,” but also because his infectious power will “create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons.” In effect, Dracula weaponizes his telepathic power to execute psychological control over the masses. At the time Stoker was writing his novel, the science of public opinion was understood by sociologists only through such tropes of spiritualism, disease, and contagion. The chapter traces the transformation of this early modernist vision of psychographics to its reprisal in the mid-century institutionalization of public opinion polling, using Auden as a touchstone to demonstrate the radical and rapid institutionalization of group psychology into everyday discourse and institutions.

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
Average
Average
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