Shawyer dissertation May 2008 final version - The University of ...

agency. 82 A smart mob may be composed of strangers who have no relationship to eachother beyond their mutual connection to the network, yet this connection creates a virtualcommunity and provides the opportunity for collective action.Sudden epidemics of cooperation aren’t necessarily pleasant experiences.—Howard Rheingold in Smart Mobs (175)The potential for ideological uses of flash mobs soon became clear by autumn2003. Because of its original apolitical nature and network organization, the flash mobwas easily appropriated for other means beyond random fun. Flash mobs were soon usedfor political and commercial ends by those seeking to capitalize on the trendy culturalcapital of flash mobs. For example, in Austin, TX, a flash mob was used as a publicitystunt to promote the Texas Book Festival (“They’re” B5). In another public relationsevent, the Russian Communist Party staged a flash mob at a showing of the movie TheMatrix in an effort to attract young members by appealing to trend-conscious youths(Danilova 3). The phrase “flash mob” even entered the public lexicon: it wasappropriated as verb in an article about the Democratic Party’s hope that young voterswill “flash-mob the polls” in the 2004 election (Gerhart C1). Because a flash mob can be82 Each node has equal agency ideally, but not always in practice. As Albert-László Barabási points out inLinked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What is Means for Business, Science, andEveryday Life (2003), some nodes with many more connections to others act as “hubs” or super-connectorswithin the network (55-64). They have more power than nodes with only a small number of links. The ideaof hubs, Barabási argues, “are the strongest argument against the utopian vision of an egalitariancyberspace” (58). The “digital divide” between the rich and the poor in many nations also challenges thewidespread diffusion of social organization by the electronic network. Nevertheless access to the networkdoes have the potential to revolutionize an individual’s concept of community.218