Flash mobs are a “large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, do something unusual for a brief period of time, then quickly disperse.” These groups are also called “inexplicable mobs”, “smart mobs” or “flash groups”, to name a few. Flash mobs carry out carefully organized and orchestrated “missions”, the first (successful) of which was carried out on June 3, 2003 when more than one hundred people went into the rug department of Macy’s in Manhattan and claimed to want to purchase a “Love Rug”. Groups such as “Improv Everywhere” carry out missions on a somewhat regular basis, stating “We’re big believers in ‘organized fun’. In the process we bring excitement to otherwise unexciting locales and give strangers a story they can tell for the rest of their lives.”

Flash mob missions are a means of uniting an essentially random group of people around a common goal.

Those moments of unity are important, say flash mob enthusiasts - especially for isolated urbanites. But because most mobbers still hold fast to privacy, caring little to meet strangers, many come and leave with friends. “Flash mob is a group event,” [Clay] Shirky [professor of interactive telecommunications at New York University] says, “but it’s not necessarily a social event.

These networks are not necessarily based on commonalities between their members, but rather for the sole purpose of carrying out a particular “mission”. They speak to the individualist nature of today’s society while still maintaining some level of community. Although these people gather for a common outing, they are no more linked than if they were everyday people walking in the same direction on the New York City sidewalks. Due to the number of participants and the speed with which the missions are carried out, mobbers most often leave with the same relationships they had when they arrived.

One example lies in the Critical Mass bike riding events that occur on the last Friday of every month in cities around the world. One can infer that their aggregated decision, and thus their “wisdom” is now their mantra: “We Are Traffic”. This speaks volumes about the future of crowd dynamics wherein a random group of virtually disconnected nodes (people) can get together and suddenly alter the dynamic of a given locale or situation. These disconnected nodes become the “many” and therefore gain power despite their lack of specific purpose.

In the end, flash mobs such as Critical Mass and the Macy’s Rug Mission wield great power. They organize and execute missions that can be, and are, interpreted as highly political and thus dangerous to the establishment. By bridging gaps between networks, even if temporarily, these mobs have the power that can be used for good or for evil. They show us that completely random groups of people, connected only by the coincidence of their participation, can have a great affect on their surroundings. These “many” have everything a group needs for an advantage over the existing “many”: size, an environment of acceptance, an individualistic, yet collective nature, and finally, the power of all of their individual knowledge. They are the ultimate Wise Crowd.