Flash Mobbing

Pillow fighting on the streets? Silent discos? Just what is this ‘flash-mobbing’ phenomenon, asks Josie Allchin

In the summer of August 2003, reporters and newspapers alike documented one of the most bizarre events ever to descend on the English capital. The public looked on in a state of bemusement and curiosity as 300 people bundled into a North London furniture shop, started to talk on the phone to an unsuspecting friend about how amazing the furniture was, while omitting the letter ‘O’ from any word they uttered.

Earlier that morning, the same crowd had descended on several pubs across London to receive instruction leaflets for what they were about to carry out that day. The leaflets ordered the crowd to make their way to the furniture shop, text a friend with the words ‘Call me’ and await the call. Once on the phone to their friends, the crowd followed the instructions on the leaflets to pick out a sofa and view it with ‘reverence’ and ‘awe’, and to speak the words, “Wow, what a sofa”! At precisely 6.40 pm the instructions commanded the crowd to leave the shop, say goodbye to someone they did not know and ‘return to their lives’.

Onlookers must have thought the world had gone barmy, or that someone had spiked their coffee with some sort of hallucinogenic drug. But no, this bizarre event was in fact a highly organised stunt – it was the UK’s first ever ‘flash-mob’.

Not even a week had gone by before a spate of similar events started to follow around the country – a flash-mob gathered in Birmingham and stripped off to ‘Give It Away’ by The Red Hot Chili Peppers, in Hull people danced the hokey-pokey, and, a little closer to home, last year Cardiff’s first ever flash-mob took place in the form of a giant pillow fight in the city centre.

And it wasn’t just the UK that was going flash-mob crazy – it seems that the rest of the world had also caught the bug. Flash-mobs were reported in the United States, Israel, Europe, Australia and Russia – which, believe it or not, has one of the biggest flash-mob ‘communities’ in the world, with over 18,000 active members in more than 30 cities.

But what actually is a flash-mob? What, if any, are the criteria that one has to meet in order to categorise such apparently random acts of chaos as a flash-mob? It seems that this question is actually easier than you might think – the flash-mobbing craze was so quick to catch on and cause a stir that official definitions have already entered the dictionary, and circulate throughout the English language.

In modern usage, a flash-mob can be described as a group of people who gather suddenly in a public place, do something unusual (often for a brief period of time), and then swiftly disperse. Bill Wasik, editor of America’s Harper’s magazine, first coined this modern use of the term when he reportedly organised the first ever flash-mob in a store of the American shopping chain, Macy’s.

Over 100 people turned up and congregated on the ninth floor rug department and gathered around one particularly expensive rug. Upon being approached by a member of staff, the crowd were instructed to inform them that the gatherers all lived together in a giant warehouse on the outskirts of New York, that they were shopping for a ‘love rug’, and that they made all their purchases and purchase decisions as a group.

Documenting the history of the fledgling flash-mobbing phenomenon is easy. Less easy is explaining exactly why people flash-mob, and what this craze has come to represent. Wasik, in his follow-up article regarding his first flash-mob creation, claimed that he set up the event as a social experiment designed to highlight conformity, and the need for individuals to feel like they are ‘insiders’, or a part of the next big thing. Presumably, Wasik anticipated that flash-mobbing was a gimmick that would never become adopted as an activity in itself, so now that flash-mobbing is no longer the latest craze, why is it still popular?

Talking to two flash-mobbers from Cardiff’s very own flash-mob society (both of whom have requested to remain anonymous), it becomes clear that the reasons behind flash-mobbing are often as light-hearted as the flash-mobs themselves: “I think its just that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. It’s nice to do something for no particular reason, turn up and do something a bit crazy” explains Bob (not his real name).

“The rest of the societies have something to them, they’ve got a thing, a reason to do something, whereas no one really does anything like flash-mobbing, which doesn’t necessarily need a reason”, Flash-Mobber no. 2 (Deirdre) tells me. The society emerged after a pair of flash-mobbers read an article on flash-mobbing: “We looked on the internet and saw that thousands of people were doing it across the world and it just looked really fun. So we decided to jump on the bandwagon, really.”

Past events in the Cardiff Flash-mob society have included a giant pillow fight and a silent disco, although it seems that some haven’t seen the funny side. A bouncer once told Deirdre, “If you don’t stop dancing I’m going to rip your head off!” But the flash-mobbers mean no harm. Some ‘victims’ of the flash-mob were even quite accommodating: “Curry’s were quite nice, they let us do the whole conga around the shop and then leave with dignity!”

It seems then that flash-mobbing is done for the sake of… well, not a lot really. Its point is that it has no point, and perhaps this is a refreshing change to everyday, purposeful monotomy. Working to pay the bills; trekking to Tesco for food – flash-mobbing liberates us from these everyday tasks for the simple reason that we take part because we don’t have to.