Flash Mob Trend Spawns A New Social Media Industry

As AT&T’s Flash Mob commercial (above) shows, the flash mob has evolved considerably from its hazy historical origins in the early '00s to mainstream commercial TV.

But there is growing agreement that digital technology has pushed social media mobbing to a new edge of immediacy and power. Compare the early reaction (sounding very last century), via Wikipedia:

Flash mob was added to the 11th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary on 8 July 2004 where it noted it as an "unusual and pointless act" separating it from other forms of smart mobs such as types of performance, protests, and other gatherings.

According to CNN, “The phrase flash mob was coined in 2003 by Bill Wasik, then an editor at Harper's magazine. It was later adopted by Web-savvy folks to describe large choreographed dances and songs in public places, usually organized through digital messaging tools. In recent years, the term has taken on an additional, darker meaning.”

In 2011, we’ve seen flash mobs that vary from the Arab Spring protests to the recent London riots and most recently, the 7-Eleven incident when more than two dozen teens ransacked a 7-Eleven store in Germantown, Maryland, and the robbery was recorded by surveillance cameras. Turns out, the 7-Eleven flash mob was actually organized on a bus trip home from a county fair, not over social media. But the coverage evidenced how quickly social media has moved center stage as the purveyor of instantaneous group power.

And now, there are apps for all that – benign, but leveraging social mobbing in unprecedented ways.

BuzzMob, one of the latest, tags itself thusly: “Social media for real life. Instantly connect with those around you sharing your real world experience.” According to All Things D:

Users create “Rings” around geographical areas–from a single building to a three-mile wide area. That place gets a virtual wall that includes a live stream of posts, tips and pictures from users who are in the location (as validated by GPS) and join the Ring. Rings can be public or password-protected.

BuzzMob’s aspiration is that venues and promoters will adopt the Rings notion as a social platform for drawing spontaneous audience. Its advantage is that it traffics in real-time conversation about a place or happening, rather than a Foursquare-like check-in.

Foursquare is itself moving toward realtime conversation. Its new version displays photos and comments related to friends' checkins inline, and it just launched its own events check-in feature:

It’s one of the most common check-ins on foursquare: you head off to a movie theater, check in, and type in ‘Harry Potter’ to tell people what you’re seeing. Or check in to a stadium and shout ‘Patriots game’ or ‘Lady Gaga concert.’ Sometimes, people will even create a new venue, like ‘U2 at the Meadowlands,’ to make sure they share the concert with all their friends. In moments like this, a place is often more than just a place; so today, we’re starting to pull major events into our database.

Yobongo, an earlier entrant in the space, also emphasizes realtime conversation: “There aren't rooms to select, friends to find, or people to follow. We magically connect you to the conversation that's happening around you.”

As social media gets the blame or credit for sparking riots and protests, control of this new medium has emerged as a new free speech issue. British Prime Minister David Cameron was roundly criticized for proposing limits on social media during the U.K. riots; and in San Francisco, BART officials were also caught in the headlights of public outrage for shutting down cell service to control threatened mob protests.

"The abuse of these networks and their capabilities hardly justifies recent talk of limiting access, shutting them down, or entrusting corporations and central authorities to monitor them at the expense of our privacy," wrote media theorist Douglas Rushkoff in a commentary for CNN.

Philadelphia has experienced repeated flash-mob violence, but recently Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said in Philly.com online chat, "Social networking is not the issue, it's how people are misusing it in order to gather and then commit a crime.”

One more dialogue irrevocably expanded by social media, the growing phenomenon of social mobbing might cause Marshall McLuhan to reframe the now iconic adage: the medium is the message.