Flash Mobs: Peaceable Assembly for Spontaneous Fun

Schmendr1ck writes "The Orlando Sentinel is carrying a story on the growing trend of 'creating a crowd on a moment's notice for no particular reason' knows as a flash mob. Recent flash mobs (sometimes hundreds of people) have wandered into into an upscale NYC shoe store acting like confused tourists from Maryland, gathered at the Hyatt near Grand Central Station for 15 seconds of spontaneous applause, and converged on the Macy's carpet department to debate the quality of the rugs for sale. Check cheesebikini? for pictures and info on past mobs, as well as links to sites that organize these events. Sounds like a fun, harmless, and Constitutionally-protected way of blowing off a little steam."

Comments

Re:Larry Niven

[ScrewMaster]

That's correct. Those stories (part of Niven's Known Space future history) took place after the invention of the matter transmitter. Whenever an interesting news story would break, bored people, reporters, whoever, would "flick in" by the thousands from around the country to see it firsthand. Once the cops would realize that a flash crowd was building, they would turn on "riot control" which would redirect anyone trying to flick back out to a central processing facility somewhere in Nevada, I think.

Actually, this sounds remarkably like the Slashdot effect, only with people not Web hits.

The first story I know of that mentions the "flash crowd" was "The Permanent Floating Riot Club", where a gang of criminals actually used flash crowds to steal.