Power of the Masses
Posted by cstipek on March 1st, 2009
I never thought that I would jump on the social networking enthusiast boat, and I’m far from thinking it could replace basic physical, mental, and spiritual interaction with another person. Yet I am in awe of the possibilities that networking can achieve. All of a sudden, organizing a massive protest or exercise is relatively easy. I keep track of groups like Improv Everywhere, which is a New York City based group involving thousands of ‘undercover agents’ who cause “scenes of chaos and joy in public places”.
In support of my earlier post, anyone interested in having a silent dance party in the UMass DuBois Library elevator? Maybe facebook will help get the word out.
Harold Rheingold mentions in the article Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies:
If I had to reduce the essence of Homo sapiens to five words, “people do complicated things together” would do. Online social networks can be powerful amplifiers of collective action precisely because they augment and extend the power of ever-complexifying human sociality. To be sure, gossip, conflict, slander, fraud, greed and bigotry are part of human sociality, and those parts of human behavior can be amplified, too. But altruism, fun, community and curiosity are also parts of human sociality−and I propose that the Web is an existence proof that these capabilities can be amplified, as well.
This is an article about a Facebook-driven event involving dancers in a major train station in London:
LONDON, England (CNN) — Thousands of dancers jammed a major London train station in a Facebook-driven “flashmob” mimicking an advertisement for a phone company. And the event last Friday evening was so successful that another is planned for next Friday in Trafalgar Square in central London. Plus, a group has been set up to organize another one at Liverpool Street Station a week later.
Videos posted on the social-networking site showed Liverpool Street Station completely filled with people, counting down the seconds until the clock showed 7 p.m., then dancing to music on their mp3 players as the hour struck. The sheer scale of the event came as a complete surprise to the organizer, a 22-year-old Facebook user who identified himself only as Crazzy Eve. “I was watching TV and the T-Mobile advertisement came up and I thought, hm, let’s get my friends down to Liverpool Street and do a little dance,” he told CNN by phone. He posted the event on Facebook and invited his friends, who invited their friends, he said, and so on until thousands of people had been told of the plan.
“At a quarter to seven people just flocked into the station like someone opened a plughole and the water went out,” he said. “They just kept coming in like sheep. As it grew and grew, I just thought, ‘This is going to be huge.’”