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A nice illustration of the power of media framing. The story of public irresponsibility has been set up for several days and photographers have been tasked to find images that fit. Look more closely. As social science research predicts, this crowd is a collection of small groups.
They are out of doors where the transmission risk is negligible and give every indication of maintaining small bubbles of people who know each other. This is no different to the moral panic about beaches, where people were doing the same but the camera angles were deceptive.
It also has echoes of the 'panic buying' stories from early on when the problem was the fragility of supermarket supply chains in the face of a small shift in consumer behaviour.
Why are we still reproducing tropes about crowd behaviour from the early 20th century when we have 100 years of research by sociologists and psychologists that have empirically discredited them?
