Flash Me! (Not really)

Some interersting articles appeared on my radar about, of all things, flash mobs.

For those who do not know, a flash mob is:

A flash mob (or flashmob) is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and pointless act for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails. The term is generally not applied to events organized by public relations firms, protests, and publicity stunts.

 

(Thanks, wikipedia.)

There are two interesting aspects of flash mobs

1) They were meant as a form of performance art, a good descendant of the Happenings in art of the 1960s.  (awesome artworks, if you can catch remakes)

2) In order to make one, you really need to leverage the power of social media in some interesting ways.  You need to get a mass together without tipping off the location in advance.

In their brief history, they tended to be used outside in the US in  areas of the FSU to protest their lack of ability to be politically engaged.  Unlike most protests, these had very little actual political content (does eating ice cream sound like politics to you?)

However, in the US, flash mobs never seemed to tap into some of our more base feelings when we assemble en mass.

Until now.

Currently, there have been riots in Philadelphia, Boston, and Brooklyn that come out of Flash Mobs spreading on places like Facebook. They’re young, they’re “urban youth” and they’ve managed to spread the idea like weeds through social networks.

People wonder when I mention that Marshall McLuhan can be read in the negative voice.  He has a great line in where he quotes a General Sarnoff saying “We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for those who wield them…” Dr. McLuhan goes on and says “It had never occurred to General Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are.”  With a more negative tone, the idea of a global village means the light political violence we “like” to wrought upon each other- it is now not only easier, but we are more able to let it get out of control.

We’ve already had the tendency towards violence and riots (as well as charity): A social network can easily compound the effect (thank you David Reed, of Reed’s law).  A social network compounded with communication technology, well that is a recipe for many things- potentially as we can see here, riots.

Oh, how we need to learn how to handle our machines before they handle us.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Flash Mob Crackdown: Who knew that flash mobs were… (sf.curbed.com)
• Readers Fwd: Penn Warns Campus Of Impending Flash Mob (philebrity.com)
• Philly Flash Mobs (michellemalkin.com)
• You: Kelley: Did Black Kids Ruin Flash Mobs? (newsweek.com)