Word: flash
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...there a greater social purpose behind the recent flash mob craze than releasing steam in these stressful post-Sept. 11 days? In a typical flash mob, scores of individuals convene with the help of instant messages and cell phones to await the often-zany instructions of their unknown leader. A San Francisco flash mob, for instance, was told to play a giant game of duck-duck-goose, and a Harvard Square flash mob flocked to the Harvard Coop this summer to ask for greeting cards for a friend named “Bill.” Since the first flash...
...evaluate flash mobs is to consider them through the lens of “social capital.” A rapidly accumulating body of evidence shows that social capital—comprised of social networks and the associated norms of trust and reciprocity—is useful to a host of public goods. Social capital promotes more responsive governmental institutions, improved education, safer streets, economic growth and even general health and happiness. But as Stanfield Professor for International Peace Robert D. Putnam described in Bowling Alone, this valuable stock of social capital has dwindled over the last generation, both...
...Could flash mobs be an antidote? Probably not, at least as they are currently configured. Flash mobs feed off social capital, with friends inviting friends, but there is little evidence that they create new friendships or deepen existing ones—if that is even their intent...
There is promise, however, at the intersection between technology and social capital, where flash mobs were born. Telephones and the Internet, unlike the passive medium of television, are both used actively and could potentially knit us more closely together. Our society is in a giant period of experimentation, and we may be inventing the technological building blocks of new social connections. For example, Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs—organized in the same way as flash mobs, but with more serious intentions—details how these active technologies helped Philippine and Seattle protesters redeploy themselves...
...intrinsic appeal of flash mobs as fun and spontaneous outlets for social energy may eventually make them useful for the generation of social capital. In Making Democracy Work, Putnam observed that stronger local civic networks, such as those composed of choral groups and soccer clubs, helped to explain why some Italian regional governments were more responsive, even though Italian citizens sang or kicked soccer balls only because they enjoyed it. Fun activities like flash mobs may thus contain a hidden tonic for new social capital...