{"id":1876,"date":"2010-12-22T20:03:49","date_gmt":"2010-12-23T01:03:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=1876"},"modified":"2010-12-22T20:03:49","modified_gmt":"2010-12-23T01:03:49","slug":"catching-up-on-flash-mobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=1876","title":{"rendered":"Catching Up On Flash Mobs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes I just don’t notice what is going on in the world. I just found out about \u201cflash mobs\u201d, thanks to my friend Mary S. She sent me a link to a popular \u201cflash event\u201d that took place in a mall food court in Toronto, whereby a group of kids distributed around the food court did a rendition of Handel’s Messiah<\/a>. I took a look afterwords on Wikipedia, only to find out that the flash mob idea<\/a> has been around since 2004. <\/p>\n

So let me get this straight. A group of people are organized and rehearse some dancing or singing or acting event, and then show up unexpectedly in a public area (on a street, in a park, at a mall, at a subway station, etc.) and do their thing for a few minutes. Members of the public who just happened to be milling about the area are surprised and often stop and watch, maybe even cheer or get involved somehow. But the most important thing is that someone is there recording all of this with a video camera. Because the critical thing about flash mobs is that they will be memorialized on You Tube or some other internet video platform, as to get thousands or maybe millions of viewings. <\/p>\n

Maybe I’m just too old to appreciate all of this. It sounds a little silly to me (but then again, I never really did dig performance art). In sum, a flash mob event is a simulation of something wonderful and spontaneous (or not so wonderful, but still spontaneous) that seemingly breaks out of ordinary social circumstances, quite randomly. I guess that it reflects a protest of sorts against the quotidian and the regulated, a dream that we are a race of beings that can do sudden wonderful things on a social basis.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the truth is that we are not such a race. Humans are an inherently social species; but once our social structures go beyond a few people, things get increasingly difficult to manage. As group size increases, the need for laws, standards, conformity and enforcement mechanisms increases exponentially (or so it seems). You can’t have a city or a nation work by instinct; it takes power structures, i.e. telling people who might disagree with whoever has power and whatever laws are promulgated, that they HAVE to conform or face nasty consequences. Even more important are the self-imposed rules and regulations of social conduct, taught painfully to us as children by parents and teachers. <\/p>\n

The flash mob thing appears to be a nice little dream, that despite all of the marshaling forces and mechanisms that apply once we leave our homes, flowers of positive social creativity can bloom unexpectedly. But to me, flash mob videos on You Tube are all the more telling of just how powerful and pervasive the quotidian and authoritarian nature of social interaction is. I’m not saying that flash mobs are bad; if they make people smile for a moment, then why not. But if you look close enough (and maybe you shouldn’t), they have a shadow side to them, a realization that humans are always going to have a hard time working together in large groups. And the larger the group, the harder it gets, despite all the wonderful instant communications technologies that now link most of the world’s citizens. <\/p>\n

Despite the internet, which makes flash mobs possible (i.e., without an internet to post the videos to, flash mobs really wouldn’t mean much), human beings are still a rather rowdy bunch. Unfortunately, most large-scale events that technically qualify as \u201cflash mob\u201d scenes involve war and terrorism. These have been happening since the dawn of human kind, they don’t need an internet for publicity. And they aren’t going away any time soon. <\/p>\n

The Handel mob scene is nice enough. But given the realities of our world, I’m sticking with the videos of \u201cSomeday at Christmas<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes I just don’t notice what is going on in the world. I just found out about \u201cflash mobs\u201d, thanks to my friend Mary S. She sent me a link to a popular \u201cflash event\u201d that took place in a mall food court in Toronto, whereby a group of kids distributed around the food court […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1876"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1876"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1878,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1876\/revisions\/1878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}