Mediated Trajectories: A Brief History of the Flash Mob

In my presentation last week, I made a passing reference to Harper's Magazine editor Bill Wasik's March 2006 article "My Crowd: Or, Phase 5: A report from the inventor of the flash mob." Wasik's confession, aside from its wonderfully acerbic tone, serves as a remarkable example of how new ideas or fads spread through and with the help of different media. Wasik's experiment—arrived at when the author was "bored and therefore disposed to acts of social-scientific inquiry"—illustrates how mildly novel ideas can be virally perpetuated in contemporary culture at astoundingly rapid rates. Wasik's article traces how his flash mob pet project moved first through his immediate social network via email, then mushroomed via blogs, the mainstream news media and eventually corporate advertising. It's a cradle to grave account, following his outlandishly cynical experiment from conception to co-option, with appropriate doses of Stanely Milgram and Komar and Melamid thrown in for good measure.