This is a very interesting paper that tackles both the evolution of our definitions of interaction, collaboration and mobility, and the change in our conception of space and time. De Souza has intelligently studied how humans have created what she calls "hybrid spaces", in the context of mobile technology development, use, and standardisation, and she uses Flash Mobs to illustrate her theory.

Flash Mobs use and rely on the characteristics of the tools that serve to create them. The way they are created and the way they happen are both subject to an evolution in how we organise, communicate and perceive ourselves through new technologies and mobile communication mediums.

De Souza (2006) maintains, and I agree with her, that these technologies have brought new possibilities in terms of communication and collaboration and have therefore shaped new social interactions and redefined the traditional frames of space and time. This idea supports the one expressed in Howard Rheingold's video I have posted on the same subject (Rheingold, 2005). By extension, this paper also underlines and follows the principles raised by Marshall McLuhan in his book "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man", especially when he says that "the medium is the message" (1964).

I found this paper at the very beginning of my research on Flash Mobs studies and I hesitated before finally deciding not to choose it. Yet, I still believe it is a valuable reference and its main strength lies in its in-depth analysis of mobile communication technologies' contribution at many levels in society.

In her conclusion, De Souza declares that mobile communication technologies "recreate urban spaces as a multiuser environment", before adding that "because mobile devices create a more dynamic relationship to the Internet, embedding it in everyday activities that happen mostly outdoors, the idea of digital spaces as instances disconnected from physical spaces no longer applies". This last statement sheds light on the importance and role of Internet and mobility on people's collaboration within the context of Flash Mobs organisations (Nicholson, 2005).

Reference

De Souza e Silva, A. (2006). From cyber to hybrid: mobile technologies as interfaces of hybrid spaces. Space & Culture, 9 (3), 261-278.,

McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press.

Nicholson, J. (2005) 'Flash! Mobs in the Age of Mobile Connectivity' The Fibreculture Journal, Iss.6 December. Accessible from http://six.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-030-flash-mobs-in-the-age-of-mobile-connectivity/print/ (accessed on 11th April, 2011)

Rheingold, H. (2005) Howard Rheingold on Collaboration. Accessible from http://www.ted.com/talks/howard_rheingold_on_collaboration.html (accessed on 10th April, 2011)

This article refers to an event that happened in a specific context. As Wasik said, mobs started as "a kind of playful social experiment", but the concept has been adapted by people depending on their socio-cultural factors. My referenced article from Virag Molnar does well in describing this phenomenon (2010). Even though Flash Mobs are now used for a number of various purposes - fun, art, entertainment, protest, politic, activism, marketing… - I don't think they should be limited to only one of those categories (Benschop, 2005).

As researchers at the Social Issues Research Centre have stated, Flash Mobs are indeed characterised by and known for their combination of military efficiency, complete anonymity, rapid communication and organisation by Internet (SIRC). But all - real - Flash Mobs lack in their instructions the indication of any purpose (Heaney, 2005). Furthermore, the motivation behind the organisation of a Flash Mob event as well as the decision to become part of it, are "left up to the individual", both who organises it and who participates (SIRC).

Yet, if Flash Mobs and social networking formations do not always serve the cultural needs of societies, they can be effective indicators of their wellness. I strongly believe, and my research on this topic supports my statement, that it is false to think that this digital art of social coordination and collaboration, emblematic of the age of communication and information, is now only serving the organisation and promotion of violent waves and events as was the case in Philadelphia.

Clay Shirky, a guru in Internet collaboration studies has demonstrated that several functions of e-mails or social media websites, like the "reply to all", "create group" or "invite" options, can be seen as social features (2008). They are essential to Flash Mobs organisation. But if it is true that the inherent capability of Internet medium is social and group-forming, the orientation of sociability and of groups created through Internet collaboration is driven by the cultural frames of the individual who participate in such interactions.

References

Dr. Benschop, A. (2005). "Flash Mob: Happening For Internetters", Sociosite's website. Accessible from http://www.sociosite.org/flashmob.php (accessed 14th April, 2011)

Heaney, F. (2005). The Short Life of Flash Mobs, Stay Free! Accessible from http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/24/flash-mobs-history.html (accessed on 15th April, 2011)

Molnar, V. (2010). Reframing Public Space Through Digital Mobilization: Flash Mobs and the Futility(?) of Contemporary Urban Youth Culture.

Shirky, C. (2008). Talks on "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations". Accessible from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/berkmanat10/2008/02/shirky (accessed on 11th April 2011)

Social Issues Research Centres. Dadaist lunacy or the future of protest? Accessible from http://www.sirc.org/articles/flash_mob.shtml (accessed on 14th april, 2011)

Hello Jacqueline.

Indeed, this article is interesting and I agree with Goodale when she states that Flash Mobs are "common humanity" celebrations, as well as innovative tools for political protests. Actually, whatever their purpose is, they are innovative processes in that they use and rely on a virtual space of total freedom - freedom of speech, press and assembly - that are the characteristics and essence of Internet (Forte, 2010). Clay Shirky's talks about his "Here Comes Everybody" book (2008), which I have posted, support this idea as well.

In the case of political protests, and this relates to several of my articles as well, they use these Internet characteristics to organise online and then act in and influence the offline world, where this freedom might not exist (Benschop, 2005, Kaza, 2009).

And this links to your idea of events similar to flash mobs that may require political intervention and suppression at a global scale. Collaborative processes use by absolutely law-abiding citizens to organise Flash Mobs, can be reproduced by people with not so peaceful intentions (Connelly, 2010).

The best example of this is the riots in Philadelphia that were assimilated to Flash Mobs because they were organised in the same way (Urbina, 2010). Elijah Anderson has written though that these events had "a quasi-carnival atmosphere" (Callari, 2010).

Yet, Ron Callari argues that due to the ease of access and use of Internet to gather and coordinate online for actions that will occur offline in face-to-face and hand-to-hand interactions, social Medias are just the cause for such derives; they are just a conduit for communication within a large group of people in a very short time.

More than an iconic image of holidays, Flash Mobs reveal themselves to be social indicators or benchmarks of society's health.

References

Dr. Benschop, A. (2005). "Flash Mob: Happening For Internetters", Sociosite's website. Accessible from http://www.sociosite.org/flashmob.php (accessed 14th April, 2011)

Callari, R. (2010). Flash Mobs: From Social Media to 'Tsunami of Kids'. Accessible from http://inventorspot.com/articles/flash_mobs_social_media_tsunami_kids_39408 (accessed 16th April, 2011)

Connelly, M. (2010). How the FlashMob Went From Art To Violence (With a Detour Through Politics). Accessible from http://www.motherboard.tv/2010/3/30/how-the-flashmob-went-from-art-to-violence-with-a-detour-through-politics--3 (accessed 16th April 2011)

Forte, M. (2010). "Clay Shirky: 15 Points on the Web Revolution in Social Collaboration and Political Communication", Political Activism and the Web. Accessible from http://webography.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/clay-shirky-15-points-on-the-web-revolution-in-social-collaboration-and-political-communication (accessed on 11th April, 2011)

Goodale, G. (2010). "Tis the season for flash mobs, you say? They're just getting started." Christian Science Monitor, 2. Accessible from http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2010/1223/Tis-the-season-for-flash-mobs-you-say-They-re-just-getting-started (accessed on 16th April, 2011)

Kaza. J. (2009). "Political Flash Mob in Riga (videoblog)", Free Speech Emergency in Latvia. Accessible from http://freespeechlatvia.blogspot.com/2009/01/political-flash-mob-in-riga-videoblog.html (accessed on 15th April, 2011)

Urbina, I. (2010). Mobs Are Born as Word Grows by Text Message, The New York Times. Accessible from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/us/25mobs.html (accessed on 15th April, 2011)

Shirky, C. (2008). Talks on "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations". Accessible from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/berkmanat10/2008/02/shirky (accessed on 11th April 2011)

Howard Rheingold is one, if not the most, interesting writer and theorist about collaboration and the use of new participatory media literacy in the framework of Flash Mobs. Cited in almost all the papers, studies and blog posts I have read, he certainly represents a respected thinker and is a reliable author of a number of books on this topic, including Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2002) and The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (2000), which establish and explain the relationship between social, cultural and new digital communication mediums. In this video in particular, Rheingold talks about the relationships between communication, Medias (as communication mediums) and collective actions. He argues that our communication means, the way we use them, how they are developed and the ways in which we organise socially have been co-evolving since the beginning of human interaction (2005). He also states that this mutual evolution has conveyed new social interactions, and one perfect example to illustrate this theory is certainly the Flash Mob phenomenon. It is just a new way to interact, made possible by online collaboration of humans expressing their natural need to socialise. This reference in my bookmark list represents a valuable piece of information as it describes the historic bond between communication, collaboration and our social development. Indeed, Rheingold emphasises the fact that collaboration, as a vital question of survival, has naturally emerged between humans. REFERENCES Rheingold, H. (2000). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. MIT Press. And (2002) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New-York: Basic Books. And (2005) Howard Rheingold on Collaboration [video streaming], accessible from http://www.ted.com/talks/howard_rheingold_on_collaboration.html (accessed on 10th April, 2011)

Clay Shirky is a guru of Internet technologies and online collaborative effort studies. This document, which contains two videos from his presentation at Harvard University, provides in-depth explanations on some chapters from his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (2008). This material is a very valuable reference on Flash Mob studies and more generally for online collaboration. Indeed, Shirky underlines how online collaborative tools are used by people to gather and coordinate without needing traditional organizational and social structures like institutions in our "real life" (Forte, 2010). The idea conveyed in both videos is that Internet, as a space of multi-level freedom, is an extension of the innate human ability to form groups, whatever the reasons. He adds that the orientation of these groups also depends on the political environment. He contextualizes the Flash Mob phenomenon in the age of digital communications and argues that Internet allows us to see the largest ever increase in our potential ability for expression. This expression turns into social interactions such as Flash Mobs. Furthermore, Shirky investigates new forms of political protest supported by Internet and hence, he uses it as a very efficient example to illustrate the shift from online to offline social coordination. He focuses on the role of emails and Flash Mobs as characteristics of political protests in the age of "easy and rapid group forming", which is a specificity of networks (Forte, 2010). REFERENCES Forte, M. (2010). "Clay Shirky: 15 Points on the Web Revolution in Social Collaboration and Political Communication", Political Activism and the Web. Accessible from http://webography.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/clay-shirky-15-points-on-the-web-revolution-in-social-collaboration-and-political-communication (accessed on 11th April, 2011) Shirky, C. (2008). Talks on "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Orga

REFERENCES (continue): Shirky, C. (2008). Talks on "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations". Accessible from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/berkmanat10/2008/02/shirky (accessed on 11th April 2011)

As Virag Molnar (2010) emphasises, researchers who have studied the Flash Mob phenomenon (and its derivatives like subway parties), have only focused on the role of digital communication technologies such as blogs, social networking websites or mobile phones, in the organisation and collaborative processes. Yet, in her paper, she remarkably examines how Flash Mobs, as new types of collective actions, provide insights into the "intersection and interaction between new communications media and changing uses of physical urban space" (2010). Using the example of Flash Mobs, she states that communication technologies (mobile phones and Internet in particular), have become powerful design tools used for encouraging new forms of sociability and collaboration, emphasising that they are at the very core of these new kinds of organisation models. Following Rheingold's concept of Smart Mobs (2002), Molnar draws the differences between Flash Mob actions happening in Western Europe or in the U.S, with contrasting Flash Mob events in Eastern Europe or Asia. She highlights that cultural factors will influence sociability as the essence of Flash Mobs and describes their instrumental use to express political, marketing or entertainment purposes. Nonetheless, it is clear from her explanations that whatever the aim of the Flash Mob is, the online collaboration step to make it happen remains as an essential aspect of offline mobilisation and acts as a springboard towards it (Picataggio, 2007). REFERENCES Picataggio, S. (2007). "Use of Social Media and the Internet", on Flash Mob: 101. Accessible from http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/fall07/Picataggio/index.html (accessed on April 12th, 2011) Rheingold, H. (2002) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New-York: Basic Books.

This paper does a great job in critically analysing how Flash Mobs, a new socio-cultural phenomenon, are in fact final products born from a complex human collaboration and use of the technological revolution that is the Internet. It clearly explains their specificity as being totally socially mediated on, by and through online digital tools (blogs, social media, forums, instant messaging) that are used as collaborative spaces to virtually organise and create a real-life upcoming interaction between people (Nicholson, 2005). What's more, the paper brings some ideas about how the Internet can also be used to "hijack" and reverse the original essence of Flash Mob philosophy, thereby turning its main assets - instantaneity, virtual proximity, massive audience reach, networks, costless operation - into potential factors for bringing chaos, as when Philadelphia experienced a very violent wave of riots (Wagner & Buzi, 2010), or when a political protest flash mob was organised in Belarus in 2006 (Peterson, 2009). Garland demonstrates the importance of cooperation and participation between network users for Flash Mobs and cites Rheingold's thesis, with which I strongly agree, that states that they are "a type of social engagement that may be created and organised by interacting with the technology of shared networks or the technologies that allow the shared networks to interact [within an event program]" (2002). Yet, this reading highlights the differences between Flash Mobs and Smart Mobs even though both can be considered as the technology itself and the use of that technology (Rheingold, 2002). In the end, The History of Flash Mobs raises larger concepts from which this phenomenon grew out of, such as communication, social or cultural studies, thus emphasising the importance of Internet as a new way for human beings to interact and collaborate in real life. REFERENCES Buzi, J. & Wagner, A. (2010) Flash Mobs: A New Social Phenomenon Philadelphia N

REFERENCES (continue): Buzi, J. & Wagner, A. (2010) Flash Mobs: A New Social Phenomenon Philadelphia Neighbors. sct.temple.edu. Accessible from http://sct.temple.edu/blogs/murl/2010/03/30/flash-mobs-a-new-socialphenomenon/ (accessed on 11th April, 2011) Nicholson, J. A. (2005) 'Flash! Mobs in the Age of Mobile Connectivity' The Fibreculture Journal, Iss.6 December. Accessible from http://six.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-030-flash-mobs-in-the-age-of-mobile-connectivity/print/ (accessed on 11th April, 2011) Peterson, N. (2009) Flash Mobs - The New Political Dissent. Accessible from http://www.neilpeterson.com/index.php/2009/11/flash-mobs-the-new-political-dissent (accessed on 12th April, 2011) Rheingold, H. (2002) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New-York: Basic Books.