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A flash mob is a group of strangers who organize themselves, using electronic media such as cell phones or the Internet, to gather together in a public place, behave in a pre-determined (and often silly) manner for a pre-determined amount of time, and then quickly disperse. A successful flash mob event depends on the element of surprise. Participants, called mobsters, share news about the time and place for an upcoming event through postings on blogs, chain e-mail messages, and SMS text messages, but no one knows exactly what they will be expected to do until they show up and are given a "script". Flash mobs can arguably be called public performance art, although participants say it's fun just to "freak people out" and shake up the status quo without breaking the law. Flash mob events have gotten media attention in New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Glasgow, and London. Various scripts have called for participants to act like robots, improvise barnyard sounds, or impersonate a group of tourists from Maryland.
One of the first flash mobs to get press coverage occurred in Manhattan in July 2003, where more than 250 strangers quickly changed their plans to meet at Grand Central Station (because news of the planned event leaked out and spoiled the element of surprise) and met instead at the Hyatt Hotel. At a pre-determined time, the mobsters gathered on the balcony overlooking the hotel's lobby. On cue, they burst into 15 seconds of loud, unexplained applause and left. Without the instantaneous nature of the communications tools used to organize the crowd, participants speculated that this particular flash mob event most likely would have been cancelled instead of moved to a new location. According to Howard Rheingold, author of "The Virtual Community" and "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution," flash mobs are not just a passing fad during the summer of 2003, but are a demonstration of the "ability for groups of people to organize collective action in the face-to-face world, in ways that they were unable to do before the combination of the Internet and mobile telephones made it possible."
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Last updated on: Nov 15, 2005
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