The medium is the mob

Abstract

Conventional narratives frame flash mobs as exemplary of the broader changes in politics, culture, and social relations brought on by new media technologies. Missing from these stories is an account of the mob itself. How do we make sense of the mob’s intensities, of the sublime power that emanates from the congregation of bodies together in space, and the ambiguities with which those intensities are received – without reducing these dimensions to the overdetermined power of a new medium? Using a broader theorization of mediation, I argue that the mob needs to be accounted for as a medium unto itself, that flash mobs present a complex ‘intermedium’ relationship between new media and the mob as a powerful but ambiguous social mediation, and that by attributing the apparent power to new media technologies, we risk undermining the efficacy of the mob as a political figuration.

Keywords

flash mobs mediation new media social media social theory technology

Introduction

In this article, I explore questions related to political figurations in the digital era. I do this through a case study of the flash mob, although the story I tell here is quite different from typical flash mob narratives. Conventional definitions describe flash mobs as ‘generally non-political acts’, in which groups ‘agglomerate in order to perform some unexpected bizarre act’ (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2010: 47). They have been hailed as exemplary of broader social, political, and cultural changes wrought by new media technologies (e.g. Baker, 2012; Rheingold, 2003; Walker, 2011).

The problem with these narratives is that they too quickly attribute the power of the flash mob to new media technologies, from SMS to social media. In doing so, they risk undermining the political efficacy of the mob while overdetermining the role of communications technology. Missing is a meta-account of the mob itself – how it is framed, by whom, and toward what end? How do we make sense of the mob’s intensities, of the power that emanates from bodies congregated together in space, and the ambiguities with which those intensities are received – without reducing these intensities to mere effects of social media? As subaltern and privileged counter-publics alike take to the streets across the world in protest of neoliberal authoritarianisms, regressive austerity measures, unemployment, military intervention, police brutality, global warming, and injustice broadly, questions about the power of the mob as political figuration are increasingly important (Badiou, 2012).

To tell a more complete story of the flash mob, I consider two flash mob ‘traditions’ which, through their juxtaposition, shed light on the contradictions associated with the mob form. On one hand are the lighthearted and fun performances that we generally think of as flash mobs. I refer to these as ‘virtuous’ flash mobs since they have been presented as exemplary new media’s ability to reaffirm sociability in the digital era (e.g. Molnár, 2014). On the other are a string of events in Philadelphia and other US cities that took place from 2009 to 2013 in which African American teenagers coordinated gatherings in public space through social media outlets, mainly Facebook and Twitter. The congregation of Black bodies in city centers sparked a moral panic, largely drowning out attempts to understand the youths’ outrage and plight (Cohen, 1972; Hall et al., 1978; Massaro and Mullaney, 2011; Welch et al., 2002). I use the term ‘vicious’ here to describe these flash mobs, as they are held up as examples of new media’s dangerous and unbridled potentials (cf. Osborne and Rose, 1999). That the virtuous and vicious flash mobs’ ‘traditions’ remain connected by both similitude and difference, proximity and distance, provides an opportunity to reflect on the ambiguity of the mob as a powerful form of social and inherently political mediation (Mazzarella, 2004, 2009).

An intermedium relationship

Writing as the Arab Spring uprisings were underway in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain, as British Prime Minister (PM) David Cameron considered blocking access to telecommunications infrastructure to thwart the coordination of riots in London, and just weeks before the first day of the Occupy campaign, David Downs (2011) of the San Francisco Examiner proclaimed 2011 to be ‘the year of the flash mob’. Within the text, Downs presents a timeline that captures multiple stripes of social actions (‘from pranks to crimes and revolution’) under the banner of ‘flash mobbery’ (reproduced here as Figure 1). Like other media coverage during the same period (e.g. Bird, 2011; Wasik, 2011), the definitional certainty around the flash mob in Downs’ account seems to certify claims that ‘new social media is [sic] central to crowd membership in the twenty-first century’ (Baker, 2012: 41). These narratives hinge on observers’ linking together of otherwise oblique social actions as mutual effects of new media – that flash ‘mobsters’ utilize mobile or social media platforms’ tactical affordances serves as a point of connection across otherwise disparate and uneven registers of sociality. The distance between entries – for example, transit officials shutting down cell phone service to prevent flash mob protests in San Francisco and a 7-Eleven robbery in Maryland, and silent discos and riots in London – is at once collapsed, in that the events are part of the same ‘evolution’, and emphasized through their juxtaposition.

Figure 1.

‘A brief timeline of flash mobbery’.

The ambivalence on display through such juxtapositions is common to discourse attending new media technologies historically (Gitelman, 2006; Marvin, 1988). New media appear to have profound effects on social relations when they first emerge, as ‘[o]ld habits of transacting between groups are projected onto new technologies that alter, or seem to alter, critical social distances’ (Marvin, 1988: 5). Politically complex and multifarious phenomena turn into cases-in-point for illustrating new media’s effects on culture and society. Here, stories of riots in London or protests in San Francisco lose their connection to the collective pain and loss that follow from deaths of minority youth at the hands of police (Badiou, 2012), instead becoming embroiled in narratives about the power of new media to transform social relations. The intimate distance and absurd proximity between a convenience store robbery and a protest portends both the promise and threat of a new medium for remediating sociality.

This overdetermination of new media reflects a categorical misrecognition that Mazzarella (2004) identifies with the era of digital media. The antidote to reductionist narratives of new media’s ‘effects’ on society requires a broader theory of mediation than we are typically accustomed to. Shifting from a discrete notion of ‘media’ to ‘mediation’, new media technologies can be understood as material frameworks in the ongoing constitution of the social through its representation. The cultural practices that appear to be affected by new media technologies are instead recognized as stabilized effects of legacy mediations, which, by virtue of their thorough embeddedness with, in, or against other social practices, give off the appearance of being ‘premediated’ (Mazzarella, 2004: 356–360). Interactions between older cultural forms and new media technologies in this sense should not be seen as interactions between ‘media’ and ‘culture’, but rather as complex interactions between variously stabilized forms of mediation – what Mazzarella calls an ‘intermedium relationship’ (p. 345). The emergence of television at the national scale may have remediated the practices, rhetorics, or iconographies associated with nationalism, but we also recognize that nationalism is itself the product of older and equally complex media and mediation practices (Anderson, 2006; Peters, 1997). A more accurate story of flash mobs, then, is not really about how new media are radically altering social distances or generating new forms of social action, but rather about how mobile and social media technologies are interacting with the powerfully ambiguous social mediation of ‘the mob’.

The mob-as-medium emerges from the affectively charged interactions between bodies congregated together in space, ‘a collection of psychic connections produced essentially by physical contacts’ (Tarde, [1898] 2010: 278). In the context of modern liberal governance, the mob is at once a necessary feature of democracy and a threat to its stability (Mazzarella, 2009; Ranciere, 2010; Rose, 1999). Rituals that bring together bodies in space are constitutive elements of embodied dispositions and identifications, from the racial to the religious to the national and ideological (Mazzarella, 2009). In Durkheim’s words,

There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of re-unions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments. (Durkheim, quoted in Holton, 1978: 222)

But as much as assemblies are integral to maintaining common sentiment, they can also be seen as a persistent threat to social order. Writing in the 19th century, mob theorist Gustave Le Bon used the term ‘crowd’ less as an analytic for collective behavior than normatively ‘as a hostile symbol for what he saw as the irrationality of mass politics’ (Holton, 1978: 220). ‘In a crowd, every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest’ (Le Bon, 1896: 18). Against the ‘republic of letters’ of the bourgeois public sphere, the mob is seen as affective not reasoned, amassed not dispersed (cf.Tarde, [1898] 2010). A crowd thinks not in ideas but ‘in images, and the image itself immediately calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first’ (Le Bon, 1896: 23). The mob here is carnivalesque, grotesque, and transgressive (Stallybrass and White, 1986), at once animalistic (Tarde, [1898] 2010) and susceptible to demagogic control in its deindividuating impulses (Le Bon, 1896) – nothing less than a threat to the social – and thus political – order (Ranciere, 2010).

Stabilizations

Whether the mob is viewed as an affirmation or threat to social order, mob mediality always appears to exist in a relation of excess to social categorizations (Bataille, 1985). The mob is non-representational, at once psychic and social, embodied but not within an individual body (Mazzarella, 2009; Thrift, 2007). Crowds may gather in protest of a given policy, but the affective intensities experienced through or against the crowd’s ‘energy’ are irreducible to any specific content. There is an affective glut to embodied collectivizations that seems to at once beg and resist assimilation into broader narratives.

The assimilation of the mob into social narratives thus entails a stabilization of its ambiguities. In the case of flash mobs, this involves a typologization of collective activity into two broad categories (e.g. Molnár, 2014). The first type, which I call ‘virtuous’ flash mobs, involves performances that playfully transgress the mores of public sociality in ways that ultimately reaffirm the cohesiveness of the social. They take as their object the strange intimacy and intimate strangeness of being in public space. Their high levels of coordination, stylization, and choreography at once hail spectators as audience and suggest at least a modicum of control, which in the end has left them open to cooptation by capitalist forces (Wasik, 2006). The second type, here called ‘vicious’ flash mobs to reflect their perception as threats to social order, is typically composed of youths of color who use social media to coordinate gatherings in downtown shopping districts (Massaro and Mullaney, 2011). Vicious flash mobs are defined less by their transgression of public social mores than by their breach of spatial orderings that govern the uneven socio-economic and racial geographies of post-industrial cities (Marcuse, 1997). Their apparent lack of planning, along with the skin color and class dispositions of their participants, marks them as a threat to urban social order. The remainder of this section describes how the excesses of the mob form have been stabilized, assimilated, and codified to fit into these reductive typologies in relation to new media technologies.

The virtuous flash mob

The first recorded ‘flash mob’ occurred at Macy’s Herald Square in Midtown Manhattan in 2003. An email sent by a man known simply as ‘Bill’ – later revealed to be Bill Wasik, then-editor of Harper’s Magazine – circulated among dozens of young professionals in New York City. The email included instructions for the recipients to meet at a bar before heading to a Midtown Macy’s, where, ‘all at once, two hundred people wandered over to the carpet in the back left corner and, as instructed, informed clerks that they all lived together in a Long Island City commune and were looking for a “love rug”’ (Wasik, 2006: 57). Within 10 minutes of the mob’s gathering at Macy’s, the mob was completely dispersed; within 10 weeks, dozens of similarly odd and seemingly inexplicable events were cropping up in cities across the United States, Canada, and Europe (Wasik, 2006). In the years since, flash mobs have become a widely recognized format.

Publicly choreographed wedding proposals or performances by professional orchestras in train stations are now common occurrences (e.g. Rao, 2012). These flash mobs fit squarely within Goriunova’s (2012) concept of ‘new media idiocy’, ‘a mode of living with technical networks’ through counter-subjectification by paying credence to the iconoclastic, the false, and the non-sequitur (p. 224). However, the motivations that Goriunova identifies differ from those of Bill Wasik, the self-proclaimed inventor of flash mobs. Whereas for Goriunova, participation in ‘idiotic’ performances allows for the self to be articulated within complex social and technological milieu, for Wasik (2006), the flash mob was inspired by the opposite of self articulation: deindividuation. Wasik cites Stanley Milgram’s controversial social psychological experiments as chief inspiration for his flash mobs. ‘The Milgramite tradition in art would be defined, I think, by the following premise: that man, whom we now know to respond predictably to social forces, is therefore himself the ultimate artistic medium’ (Wasik, 2006: 60). Flash mobs, in Wasik’s machinations, were about the choreography of sociality itself as content. Reacting to the elitism and scene fetishism of New York City hipsterdom, Wasik’s mobs poked fun at participants, who, in turn, became unwitting subjects of a long-form prank or joke about obedience:

the mob was enacting obedience not just in some generic sense but in specific reference to hipster culture, so that the self-ridicule was made explicit. I was pointing out that hipsters… are in fact a transcontinental society of cultural receptors, straining to perceive which shifts to follow. (p. 62)

These motivations stand in stark contrast to their reception by subsequent mob leaders as well as the cultural gurus of product marketing who took up the flash mob as a form of guerilla marketing. As quickly as the flash mob spread among urban web literati, it also became a case study in demonstrating the inherent sociability, and thus profitability, of new media. Marketers, eager to capitalize on flash mobs’ potential for promoting products or fostering brand awareness, latched on (cf. Grant, 2014; Lum, 2010). In Summer 2005, a series of ‘flash concerts’, sponsored by Ford Motor Company and Sony Digital Pictures, became emblematic of this cooptation:

ten free unannounced-until-the-last-minute concerts performed by hot and emerging music artists in secret locations across the USA. All 10 acts are announced to ‘Insiders’ at the last minute and you can be an insider if you visit the Fusion Flash Concerts web site and register all your details. (Hanlon, 2005)

Flash mobs thus became one of the first ways that marketers began tapping Web 2.0’s participatory appeal for product promotion, and they did so in a way that relied on the imprimatur of the flash mob as a form of cultural capital. As one Ford representative said to Wasik (2006) at the first of the Ford flash concerts, ‘Everybody wants to feel like an insider’ (p. 64).

The vicious flash mob

By 2009, however, news items from Philadelphia and elsewhere were claiming that the flash mob was ‘devolving’ from inane cultural spectacle into a more archaic form. As the New York Times and other outlets reported, what started ‘innocently enough’ as Wasik’s performance-events had

taken a more aggressive and raucous turn … as hundreds of teenagers have been converging in downtown [Philadelphia] for a ritual that is part bullying, part running of the bulls: sprinting down the block, the teenagers sometimes pause to brawl with one another, assault pedestrians or vandalize property. (Urbina, 2010)

Descriptions of this new, dangerous breed of flash mobs – almost exclusively involving African American teens – invoked the hysteria of 19th-century mobs: ‘young people running amok, lighted cell phones in hand, looking like contemporary rabble brandishing torches and terrorizing the countryside’ (Lubrano, 2010). Connections between the lighthearted, if bizarre, ‘virtuous’ flash mobs and this new phenomenon were as self-evident as they were perplexing, suggesting a backward teleology: ‘“Mob” is no longer a tongue-in-cheek designation. It has now taken on the connotations of its original definition: “a large or disorderly crowd; especially: one bent on riotous or destructive action”’ (Kaminski, 2013: 7).

From 2009 to 2013, Philadelphia became an epicenter for this trend, threatening the city’s ramped-up efforts to rebrand itself as a safe tourist destination (Goodman, 2011; Massaro and Mullaney, 2011; Urbina, 2010). The term ‘flash mob’ was first applied to these incidents during the trial of a man accused of assault, battery, theft, and incitement to riot after a mass gathering on South Street, a commercial corridor and popular destination for teenagers on the southern border of Philadelphia’s wealthy Center City (Massaro and Mullaney, 2011; Slobodzian, 2009). Testimony from police and other witnesses described the event as ‘an attack by a “flash mob,” convened by teens and young adults through texting and online social messaging sites’ (Slobodzian, 2009). Hundreds of people ‘blocked traffic, pounded on cars, stole merchandise, and assaulted several people’ as they marched down the middle of the street (Figure 2). Within a year, similar events were taking place in the city at almost regular intervals. In February 2010, after reading a post ‘on Twitter or Facebook’, hundreds of teens gathered at a mall in Center City for a snowball fight, after which they ran through a nearby department store (Sheridan, 2010). On a Wednesday afternoon in early March, between 50 and 100 teens tore through Center City’s dense rush hour traffic ‘on a rampage’ (Cuellar, 2010).

Figure 2.

Flash mob on South Street, Philadelphia.

Despite this sensationalized reporting, the majority of flash mob participants’ behavior was unremarkable. Reports of violence associated with Black teenagers were over-represented, as is typical of moral panics (Cohen, 1972; Shaw, 2013). As Massaro and Mullaney (2011) note, ‘Though the coordinated appearance of these teens is markedly unusual, their presence in these spaces and at these times (often after school or on a Saturday evening) is not’ (p. 592). According to one high school student, the ‘flash mobs were just an exciting thing to check out, no violence or harm intended’ (Shaw, 2013). Municipal cutbacks for community centers and a floundering public school system meant that fewer structured activities were available for young people, although these details were notably absent from most reporting.

Instead of allocating resources to alleviate structural pressures on dozens of the city’s low-income neighborhoods, the City responded by mobilizing expensive law enforcement resources to preempt and prevent the flash mobs. The Philadelphia Police Department increased its street presence during key times, but this proved to be a failure. A second flash mob took place on South Street, this time in staggering numbers, with some observers estimating more than a thousand participants. According to one witness, ‘There was a crowd of people all running on both sides of the street and in the street, not really listening to the cops, who were trying to control everyone. And everyone was angry and yelling’ (Odom, 2010). Even with scores of back-up police officers called in from their patrols in other neighborhoods across the city, it nonetheless took several hours before the streets were cleared.

The City thus took further steps toward preempting and preventing mobs from forming. In addition to proclaiming a ‘zero tolerance’ policy regarding both teens’ actions and their parents’ liability, City Hall instituted ‘curfew zones’ and ‘targeted enforcement areas’, making it illegal for anyone under the age of 18 to be in the city’s commercial spaces without the accompaniment of a parent or guardian (Goodman, 2011). Police also partnered with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to surveil teens’ social media activity (Urbina, 2010). Four days after the second South Street mob, police purported to have preempted an incident in University City, another wealthy enclave, through social media monitoring. Mayor Michael Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey held a press conference at the site, asking parents to ‘monitor their children’s online activity and text messages’ and to report anything suspicious to the police. ‘I ran for Mayor’, Nutter said to the crowd of reporters, ‘I didn’t run for mother’ (Graham and Steele, 2010).

While law enforcement was increasing surveillance of African American teens’ social media, they also made a concerted effort to differentiate the ‘true’ flash mobs from the false. For example, officials indicated that an incident at a downtown Wendy’s was not, in fact, a flash mob: ‘We had no indication that any kind of social media was used; there wasn’t a big Facebook blast or anything’, noted Lt. Raymond Evers, explaining that ‘flash mobs traditionally form after participants alert each other online’ (DiFillipo, 2011). Again in April 2013, after nearly 200 teens gathered at a downtown intersection, the Mayor’s office quickly dismissed its designation as flash mob: ‘There is no evidence that this was a flash mob … I prefer not even to have the words in there because it’s a little unfair’ (Chang, 2013).

This type of definitional boundary work provided a way for officials to codify the flash mob into a coherent pattern and to render it amenable to surveillance. Massaro and Mullaney (2011) describe the overdetermination of social media in law enforcement discourse as ‘flash mob fetishism’. Focusing on the media consumption patterns of individual perpetrators – or in Mayor Nutter’s words, a ‘relatively small number of complete knuckleheads’ (Susman, 2011) – worked to obscure the relationship between social and spatial exclusions in the city. Flash mob fetishism also provided law enforcement a rationale for disproportionately targeting low-income communities of color, including disciplinary techniques that would undoubtedly spark protests if enacted in wealthier quarters of the city (Goffman, 2014).

The preemptive actions taken by the Philadelphia Police Department also became a model for broader law enforcement strategies for integrating social media surveillance into police work. In 2011, the Dallas Police Department organized a conference titled Social Media, the Internet, and Law Enforcement (SMILE), which featured a host of delegates who cited Philadelphia as case study for how crowd dispersal and riot prevention could be made more efficient through online surveillance (Wasik, 2011). The US Department of Justice (2013) likewise cited the Philadelphia Police’s online surveillance measures as ‘best practices’ in a guide for online surveillance designed for use by local police departments titled Social Media and Tactical Considerations for Law Enforcement.

Most significantly, flash mob fetishism facilitated a logic in which preemptive law enforcement tactics could become a solution to the youths’ disruptive behavior without consideration of long-term solutions, such as remedying the lack of access to basic city resources like educational support or youths’ alienation from privileged spaces of consumption. In sum, this fetishism, in conjunction with the moral panic that it helped foment, worked to stabilize a narrative about the power that new media technologies can have on ‘the dangerous classes’ while reinforcing uneven social and racial geographies.

Mob mediality

Considering the ‘virtuous’ and ‘vicious’ varieties of flash mob together helps illustrate the ‘intermedial’ nature of the relationship between new media technologies and the mob as social mediation. In order to more fully understand the mediality of the mob, however, it is helpful to further elaborate the relationship between media and mediation. For what the mob-as-medium forces us to confront are the contingencies of social identification.

For Mazzarella (2004), ‘mediation’ describes ‘the processes by which a given social [formation] produces and reproduces itself in and through a particular set of media’ (p. 346). Mediation, in other words, refers to the continuous work of constructing and reconstructing social identity through representation. ‘Media’, then, are the necessary ‘material framework[s]’ through which mediation takes place, not just painting or television but also ritual, performance, and representation most broadly construed (Mazzarella, 2004). Social formations, from the individual to the group to religion, race, or nationality, survive only through their mediation and remediation – the representations with or against which social actors construct their identities. Identification requires a beholding, a distancing that makes the recognition of the self possible. Media and mediation make the social visible.

To consider the mob as medium, then, requires that we begin imagining the mob’s congregation of bodies in space as a material framework of mediation. Like other media, the mob-as-medium contributes to the production of social formations. Unlike Le Bon’s critique of the mob’s affective and imagistic thought, the mob should instead be seen to reflect back to its participants and observers a social image – even if that image inevitably fails to fully render the affective energy, potentiality, and excess of the congregation of bodies together in space. In this act of mediation, the mob is stabilized, reduced to narrative, in ways that can be mobilized in support of political projects. In the case of the ‘virtuous’ brand of flash mobs, the mediation of the mob is reduced to a commodification of its cultural cache, despite its sardonic origins. With the ‘vicious’ Philadelphia flash mobs, the congregation of Black bodies is filtered through the lens of law enforcement tactics such that its communicability is reduced to criminality. In both cases, what the mob communicates is sociality itself, and whether that sociality is perceived as an affirmation or threat to the social order may determine how its excesses are codified to match extant social categorizations. If, as John Durham Peters (1997) writes, the representation of the social ‘is always potentially a political act, an act of constitution or revelation’, then what an understanding of mob mediality highlights are the contingencies of such representations (p. 82).

Ranciere (2010) uses the term police to describe the way that sanctioned representations circumscribe the social, making it legible, thinkable, and actionable as a political object. The police refers to the ‘symbolic constitution of the social’ through its division, ‘the dividing-up of the world (de monde) and of people (du monde)… that which separates and excludes [and] that which allows participation’ (p. 36). The uncanny juxtaposition of ‘virtuous’ and ‘vicious’ flash mobs invites reflection on the policing of society, its dividing up into often-violent social categories. The police here acts by stabilizing the mob into the binary schema of ‘virtuous’ and ‘vicious’ and, in so doing, staunches the communicability of those actions perceived to be a threat to the social order. If one subscribes to Ranciere’s definition of democracy as an ongoing process to disrupt the policed society, then the subject of politics in the digital era cannot be explained as the result of new media’s ‘effects’ nor as the work of ‘a relatively small number of complete knuckleheads’ who get their hands on social media to incite riot among hapless friends (Kaminski, 2013). Rather, the subject of politics must instead be understood in situ, by considering the ways in which digital mediation interact with the social mediation of the excluded. Building more democratic cities means taking these figurations seriously as a rally against unjust divisions, not just between spaces of consumption and exclusion (Marcuse, 1997) but also between those that delimit which congregations of bodies have a right to city space.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This paper benefitted from the generous input of Omar Al-Ghazzi, Marwan Kraidy, Emily LaDue, Deb Lui and Jasmine Salters.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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