It all begins, once again, with science fiction. In 1973 author Larry Niven published the novella Flash Crowd, which imagined a world in which the invention of affordable mass teleportation devices meant that, within seconds of any newsworthy event taking place, huge numbers of people would almost instantly arrive on the scene.
A futuristic vision of technologically enhanced rubbernecking (itself a delightful slang word that emerged at the very end of the nineteenth century in America to describe someone whose neck seemed to be made of rubber, so intent were they on listening in on others’ conversations), Niven’s title was subsequently taken up to describe a virtual version of the same effect: the sudden arrival of huge numbers of people on one webpage, usually via a link from an enormously popular site.
One of the first major generators of online flash crowds was the technology site Slashdot—so much so, in fact, that the term “Slashdot effect” is often used to describe a sudden, overwhelming influx of online traffic thanks to a popular link. Slashdot itself was founded in 1997, offering a collection of user-submitted links to technology news stories and articles complete with lively comment threads. With over five million monthly users, receiving a prominent link from Slashdot can cause smaller sites to be overwhelmed—a phenomenon sometimes simply termed “being slashdotted.”
Inevitably, other popular sites have attracted their own variants of this verb. Crashing under the weight of visits sent your way by popular news aggregation site The Drudge Report is known as being “Drudged,” while links from the humorous aggregation site Fark can lead to your site being “Farked.” More inventively, a deluge of web traffic coming from the popular American politics blog Instapundit is known as an “Instalanche.”
Returning to the original notion of flash crowds, cheap mass teleportation remains a long way distant technologically, but what we do possess is cheap mass organizational tools—something that has helped create the analogous phenomenon of “flash mobs.” A flash mob is a crowd of people who have used new media to assemble rapidly in a public place, usually in order to perform an apparently spontaneous act of coordinated protest, art, or advertising.
The world’s first successful flash mob was organized in June 2003 by one Bill Wasik, an editor at Harper’s Magazine, who arranged for participants in four locations in New York to gather in groups of over one hundred people and await instructions. When they came, these involved the seemingly spontaneous performance of absurdist actions (precisely fifteen seconds of mass applause from the mezzanine level of the Grand Hyatt hotel; two hundred people simultaneously turning up to buy a single rug in Macy’s department store). As Wasik puts it, the experiment used mass communications to create “an inexplicable mob of people . . . for ten minutes or less.”134
If Wasik’s experiment was intended as satire, it’s a fine irony that flash mobs today are perhaps above all associated with filmed examples used by brands for self-consciously trendy marketing campaigns. More interesting, though, there’s also the growing creation of what’s known as “smart mobs”: large crowds of people whose massed behavior is intelligently coordinated by the use of smartphones and other digital devices.
The creation of smart mobs has helped fundamentally alter the dynamics of events such as political protests, with plugged-in members of the crowd able to access the kind of information and capacities for coordinated action previously only possessed by trained military and law-enforcement units. Intelligent group behavior doesn’t have to be political—and examples have included coordinated crowd performances at concerts and the mass use of cameras to record and broadcast an event—but there are powerful political implications in the fact that most members of modern crowds are now anything but mob-like in their capacities for action, reaction, and communication.