Howard Rheingold, whose book Smart Mobs I'm reading between weblogs, has decided to limit news of "flash mobs" on his site. The things do seem to be the international telephone-booth-stuffing fad of summer '03, more dada than democratic. Rheingold had more to say about the difference in an Online Journalism Review article last month.
As for flash mobs, the Times, CNN and Christian Science Monitor are all on the case, which must mean the end is near... or that flash-mobbers, webloggers and news gatekeepers are all alike in feeling the need for a silly-season distraction from war, anxiety and politics,
Personally, I thought last week's "first Boston flashmob" (which was not in Boston, but Cambridge) seemed awfully intent on taking its own picture... or pictures of the TV folks taking pictures of the mob taking pictures... then blog-rolling the results.
While Rheingold's book often deals with powerful-but-subtle organizing via cell-phone text-message lists, there's nothing subtle about the almost 800-person mailing list that played a part in the "mob" visit to the Harvard store:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bostoncitymob/
The results? Here are a few blog samples:
http://bradleysalmanac.com
http://bitter-girl.com/boston-mob.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/claudia_/45262.html
http://popone.innocence.com/archives/001040.html
http://www.wickedgood.info/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=11177
Somewhere in there I noticed a comment thread suggesting that people should avoid making life more miserable for low-paid shop clerks. On the other hand, the cleaning-up could be worse, as suggested by http://www.gpster.net/wankmobs.html
2:40:09 PM 
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