Perhaps you’ve heard of the flash mob, a phenomenon that became vogue in the early/mid 00′s, generally defined as “a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse.” Flash mobs are organized anonymously, through e-mail, text messaging, or social networking sites.
In the 2006 article “My Crowd, or Phase 5: A report from the inventor of the flash mob,” Harper’s editor Bill Wasik revealed that he created the first flash mob in May 2003. Wasik conceived of the flash mob as a social experiment to comment on the conformist behavior and “scenesterism” of urban hipsters, but soon found that his experiment had become a media sensation: a flash mob murder was a major plot point in a 2004 episode of “CSI: Miami”, and Wasik describes attending a “flash concert” organized by Ford and Sony to promote the Ford Fusion.
Wasik’s article is also an insightful (and frequently funny) commentary on a weird paradox inherent in today’s digital media culture: while it gives us the tools to create new and interesting forms of expression (the flash mob, for instance), it also enables the “mob mentality” on a massive scale.
I think this would be a great reading for either Monday or Wednesday, but I can’t decide which–maybe we should put it to a vote?
2 responses so far ↓
sprinkles // April 25, 2009 at 2:51 pm
I would definitely vote to read this article. It is an incredibly interesting phenomenon organized through the internet. It would be interesting to hear other’s opinions on the topic. A flash mob would have several inherent dynamics that could cause people to act abnormally. It would be interesting to hear other’s opinions about how this operates.
njs12008 // April 25, 2009 at 6:57 pm
That would definitely be an interesting article to read. And I actually remember just seeing an example of the flash mob last week on digg.com. Some performing group brought about 200 people into a Home Depot in New York City and had them all “shop” in slow motion (they didn’t get in the checkout line because that would have just been obnoxious). Certainly an odd phenomenon, and one that owes its existence very much to modern communications technology.