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FLASHMOBS AS NEW YOUTH'S FASCINATION (ФЛЕШМОБЫ КАК НОВОЕ УВЛЕЧЕНИЕ МОЛОДЕЖИ)
Асадуллина Л.А., Колесова Е.В. гр.49-73В (Мурзина Г. А.)
Flashmob is a term coined in 2003 to denote a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and sometimes seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment. Flash mobs are organized viatele communications, social media, or viral emails. The term is generally not applied to events and performances organized for the purposes of politics (such as protests), commercial advertisement, publicity stunts, that involve public relation firms, or paid professionals.
The first flashmob.
The first flash mob was created in Manhattan in May 2003, by Bill Wasik, senior editor of Harper's Magazin. The first attempt was unsuccessful after the targeted retail store was tipped off about the plan for people to gather. Wasik avoided such problems during the second flash mob, which occurred on June 3, 2003 at Macy's department store, by sending participants to preliminary staging areas - in four prearranged Manhattan bars - where they received further instructions about the ultimate event and location just before the event began.
Wasik claimed that he created flash mobs as a social experiment designed to poke fun at hipsters and to highlight the cultural atmosphere of conformity and of wanting to be an insider or part of "the next big thing". The Vancouver Sun wrote, "It may have backfired on him... Wasik may instead have ended up giving conformity a vehicle that allowed it to appear nonconforming." In another interview he said "the mobs started as a kind of playful social experiment meant to encourage spontaneity and big gatherings to temporarily take over commercial and public areas simply to show that they could"
Precedents and precursors
In 19th century Tasmania, the term flash mob was used to describe a subculture consisting of female prisoners, based on the term flash language for the jargon that these women used. The 19th century Australian term flash mob referred to a segment of society, not an event, and showed no other similarities to the modern term flash mob or the events it describes.
Cultural and political theorist Hans Magnus Enzensberger outlined an early gathering that took advantage of a glitch in the Swedish public telephone service. In September 1982, several dozen school children dressed in bright-colored clothes met at the Fridhelmsplan in Stockholm, Sweden. The group did not gather in protest, but instead simply stood in loose groups talking to one another. After approximately one thousand people had gathered, they moved toward Ralambshovspark. Fifty members of the police intercepted the group with vans, truncheons, and dogs. While attempting to disperse the young people, police hit some with truncheons, the dogs became restless, there were bruises and torn clothes and stones were thrown. The next day, it was revealed that the group had assembled after several children had discovered an technical defect in the public-telephone network whereby anyone who dialed certain
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