Flash Mobs, Violence and the Turbulent Crowd

Abstract

On the evening of 30 May 2009, thousands of teenagers descended on South Street—a lively shopping district on the edge of Center City Philadelphia—in a turbulent gathering that the local press quickly labeled a ‘flash mob.’ A few dozen outliers in this adolescent crowd turned violent, and in the first three months of 2010, four more violent flash mobs erupted in the city. Through an analysis of these raucous events, we argue that the structural similarity between violent and non-violent flash mobbing runs deeper than the use of email, social media and mobile technology as organizing tools. Regardless of whether they act with whimsy or aggression, flash mobbers disrupt the tightly laced social and spatial conventions of the contemporary city. Their actions thrust street-side spectators into what Eugenio Barba calls ‘a sudden vortex’, a performative encounter that ‘shatters the security of comprehension and is experienced as turbulence.’

This is not to deny that flash mobs have a history. On the contrary, crowd actions remarkably similar to flash mobs took place in Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York as early as the Revolutionary War, unsettling the presumption that flash mobs are a new species of performance uniquely enabled by digital technology. Drawing on examples both past and present, we use the concept of turbulence to investigate trans-historical patterns in the dynamics of the urban crowd. And we argue that both historical crowd actions and contemporary flash mobs enact group coalescence and dissolution, modifying the relations among participants, spectators and targets of violence – even though the new group formations emergent within a crowd are often simultaneously concealed by the crowd's turbulent instability.

Notes

¹ The first edition of Sanderson's Biography of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence was published in nine volumes from 1820 to 1827, and excerpts were frequently reprinted in newspapers. For example, the passage quoted here appears in Fry 1825.

² A review of McElroy's Philadelphia City Directory for 1842 could not confirm the potential family ties between Henry and John Johnson or Edward and Elizabeth Stewart.