Cutting Edge Crowding : Flash MOBs Explained
Posted on June 18, 2003 at 10:25 am | No Comments
Random, jacked-in New Yorkers are using email and cell-phone messaging to coordinate Flash MOBs… sudden, unexplained crowds of people who gather in one place, doing something, for 10 minutes or less… confounding clueless onlookers. The most recent gathering was in the Macy’s rug department, where everyone stared at one specific rug. Check out the photographic evidence.
Here are some excerpts from the email instructions for yesterday’s MOB #2:
You are invited to take part in MOB, the project that creates an inexplicable mob of people in New York City for ten minutes or less. Please forward this to other people you know who might like to join.
Instructions:
(1) At some point during the day on June 17th, synchronize your watch to this time.
(2) By 7 PM, based on the month of your birth, please situate yourselves in the bars below. Buy a drink and act casual.
(3) Then or soon thereafter, a MOB representative will appear in the bar, wearing one of the “trucker hats” that is so stylish these days. He or she will pass around slips of paper, on which three important pieces of information will be printed: (a) the MOB site, (b) a particular item at the site, and (c) a secret phrase. Commit all three to memory and put the slip in your pocket. ONCE YOU ARE AT THE MOB SITE, NONE OF THESE SLIPS OF PAPER SHOULD BE VISIBLE.
(4) Leave the bar and walk to the MOB site as quickly as possible. No one should arrive at the final MOB destination until 7:26.
(5) Find the item and stand around it. Greet everyone, even those you do not know. Talk among yourselves about the item and its relative merits and demerits.
(6) At 7:37 you should disperse. Thank the salespeople for their help, but explain that the item has been “voted down.”
(7) Return to what you would otherwise have been doing. Await instructions for MOB #3.
Absolutely, pointlessly, perfectly, brilliant.
If you’re in NYC, join in. If a Boston MOB starts up, I’m very there. Thanks for clueing me in, Hollis.
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