Smart Mobs: What Flash Mobs and Political Protests Have in Common

In 2014, more than four thousand straphangers in New York City—and countless others in twenty-five countries around the world—boarded mass-transit trains in their boxers, briefs, or bloomers for a coordinated “no pants subway ride” (Improv Everywhere, 2014). A seemingly spontaneous dance performance also erupted in 2014 among passengers at a train station in Shanghai—it was to celebrate the Chinese new year and renew interest in Chinese folk traditions. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street demonstrators converged on New York’s Zuccotti Park to protest economic policies that they felt were deepening the divide between rich and poor.

What do these stories have in common? They’re all examples of smart mobs: large groups of individuals who act in concert, even though they don’t know each other, and who connect and cooperate with one another, at least initially, via electronically mediated means (Rheingold, 2002). But smart mobs have two important additional characteristics that a generic social network lacks: a shared goal and a finite time frame (Harmon & Metaxas, 2010). Like all electronic social networks, smart mobs are grounded in a shared desire for communication and rely on affordable devices that offer instantaneous communication. Simply communicating is not enough to make a smart mob—there must be a tangible goal that is organized via mediated communication and achieved quickly and effectively.

There’s a difference, of course, between a social movement and an absurd, pants-free subway ride. The latter is what has come to be called a flash mob—a form of smart mob in which people come together for a brief public act that may seem pointless or ridiculous. Even if the goal, often entertainment or artistic expression, seems not-so-smart, flash mobs are still smart mobs: through technology the participants are organized and quickly mobilized to carry out their collective act. Political protests, on the other hand, are largely comprised of activists who may already be connected and organized but use technology—including smart mob demonstrations—as tools for making their political or social goals more visible (Conover et al., 2013). In fact, the term smart mob was first identified in 2001, when calls for protest in the Philippines spread via text message, gathering more than a million people to a nonviolent demonstration in Manila within four days. Largely hailed as the world’s first “e-revolution,” the Manila protests quickly and peacefully brought about the resignation of President Joseph Estrada.

In the years since, social media–fueled revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and other Middle Eastern nations—sometimes referred to as “Twitter Revolutions” by media pundits—have bolstered the notion that electronic communications are somehow responsible for modern social movements. This is, most likely, an oversimplification: social movements are usually the culmination of frustrations that have been building for many years, which come to a pinnacle when activists begin to organize. Malcom Gladwell points out that one of the most dramatic political demonstrations in American history started with just four African American college students asking for service at a “whites only” lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960; within a month, the sit-ins had spread throughout the South—all without a single text or tweet (Gladwell, 2010). But, even then, the existing media played an important role: newspaper photos of those first four students printed in the Greensboro Record inspired others to join them.