Pretty astounding and exciting because as the story unfolds we believe it, well, I did.
These events did happen, just not all at the same time, as Tom explains. But the idea of an action causing a reaction, which snowballs, is highly plausible today for the following reasons.
The increase in social networking is the likely driver. If social networks were a person, he or she would be your best friend who is an unapologetic gossip. The most intelligent person you know who has a crazy thirst for celebrity scandal. Your friend would love learning new things, covering an unimaginable range of topics. This friend never sleeps, they know everybody, sort of, and they exist as the biggest chatterbox you have ever met. Oh, and they’re FAST too.
So how does a viral gather speed through social networks? The poor young girl in the video isn’t a particularly good singer (apologies if she’s reading this!), the lack of talent is the funny part, as is the candid nature of the video. Virals are so precisely unpolished that their imperfections are perfect. They grab us so much more than most shiny advertisements. Perhaps that is the key to a viral: candid, ironic, humorous, something ’so rubbish it’s good’.
Perhaps then, a flash mob gathers momentum in the same way. The idea of turning up at an agreed location as part of a huge unexpected crowd could be an appealing novelty if you were caught up in the idea at the time. Of course the more popular these phenomena get, the more unstoppable their popularity becomes.
With a flash mob, you have to actually leave your house and go somewhere, so the fact that there are far fewer flash mobs than virals is a testament to the idea that it must be easy for us to join in, otherwise we probably won’t. The effort of pasting a link compared to travelling to a nominated location is obviously somewhat mismatched.
Virals and flash mobs are like inside jokes. You don’t hear about them on the news or in the papers, it’s a community thing and we all want to be a part of it. When something popular springs up, our crowd mentality is in its element. Basically we don’t want to be left out. We might like it because one of our friends clicked a button to say that they like it too – and so the snowball begins.
Tags: flash mobs, memes, offline, online, social media, virals
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