How Do Social Media Contribute to the Emergence of “Extreme” Events? The Rise of Tour Paris 13

Academy of Management Discoveries: December 2024, Vol. 10, No. 4
Read the article: https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/...

How Do Social Media Contribute to the Emergence of “Extreme” Events? The Rise of Tour Paris 13: The “Sistine Chapel” of Street Art
By Raymond A Thietart and Julien Malaurent

Extraordinary events are exceptional and leave lasting memories in participants’ minds and sometimes in those of a broader audience. Social media seem to be playing a growing role in the occurrence of such events. We analyze the physical interactions between actors and their digital exchanges, which shaped the emergence of an event that developed around an unexpectedly successful, self-directed street art phenomenon. Interviews, onsite observations, and statistical analyses of social media traces reveal patterns in which the physical event and its digital counterpart recursively nurtured each other. These factors operated as a complex dissipative system in which independent actors interacted within and across physical and digital boundaries. Physical activities influenced digital activities, which in turn affected artistic creation and fueled the public’s eagerness to participate, transforming the event into a large art happening. Empirical observations reveal that the digitalization of the art show shaped the emergence of the event and stabilized it by placing it in a state of dynamic equilibrium. The event’s evolution, measured by its social media activity, followed a Power Law, indicative of a phenomenon induced by multiple interdependent and multiplicative interactions social media afford. This signifies the existence of a statistically extreme, rare event.