Didn't the London flash mob get a lot of press? OK, so it's August and the silly season for news, but isn't it easy to manipulate the media and get them to cover your event? Or maybe they were manipulating us. Further blog coverage of the sofa-based gathering (in addition to my report below) can be found here, here and here (except that the last site seems to have drowned in an ocean of excess bandwidth). There also are 60 or so photographs of the event here. I was delighted to discover that I appear in only one of them (and even then heavily blurred).
Meanwhile on Thursday New Yorkers were already attending their sixth flash mob, assembling in Toys R Us in Times Square to kneel down and worship a giant animatronic dinosaur. O Mighty Lizard, what is thy command? It looked brilliant on the news, but reports from those who were there (here, here, here and here) tell a slightly more cynical story. Mobs organised in confined spaces don't seem to work as well as those out in the open, where everyone is able to assemble and disperse in a flash, and where there are far more passers-by to be surprised by the whole event. Apparently some people don't seem to be able to set their watches properly and premature mobbing can spoil the intended effect. And then there's the media again, of course.
I've always believed that the presence of a camera at an event, large or small, can change the nature of what is being photographed. A happy birthday party can turn quickly to embarrassment when someone whips out a camera to record the event. A holiday can become reduced merely to a series of photo opportunities, ready to parade in front of bored friends when you return home. And a large crowd at a flash mob taking photographs of themselves at a flash mob is somehow missing the point of being there in the first place, and giving the game away to passers-by that this wasn't a spontaneous event after all.
Alas it's impossible to keep the press and media away from these supposedly top-secret gatherings (they can sign up for information just like everyone else) and it'll be even more impossible after all this recent publicity. There are already copycat plans for flash mobs right across the UK (Nottingham, Cardiff, Milton Keynes, Walthamstow?) but I fear that the bubble may already have peaked. And how long before, say, a sofa-bed manufacturer decides to organise a flash mob under the cloak of anonymity, merely to gain huge amounts of publicity for their store? Actually, come to think of it, that may already have happened...
