“’Q. Why would I want to join an inexplicable mob?

A. Tons of other people are doing it.’”

–Bill Wasik, “My Crowd” Harpers Magazine. Mar 2006, Vol. 312 Issue 1870, p56-66.

A monument both to the potential vacuousness of “information” cascades and the way individuals and other actors learn to coopt the social environment surrounding them, the Flash Mob fad of 2003 to early 2006 was once the next big thing. Beginning in the summer of 2003, New York seemed to be full of flash mobs, inexplicable semi-impromptu gatherings of hip urbanites who would, anonymously, collectively, stage largely meaningless spectacles and then disperse. Naturally, they spread and this is turned triggered massive, largely empty media attention, aggrandizing what amounted to a uniquely empty trend into a much-scrutinized catalyst for cultural or political organization. The hype was unbelievable. Then in March 2006, Harpers editor Bill Wasik published “My Crowd” and revealed the truth. Two main facts emerged over the Harpers piece, which detailed the origins and implications of the phenomena: One, Wasik was in fact the until-then-semi-anonymous “Bill” who created the “flash mob” back in 2003, and secondly, flash mobs were even more interesting than the hype had supposed, the main component of Wasik’s Milgramesque sociological experiment on and parody of conformity among the young, the hip, and the urban.

Flash Mobs were in a sense an information cascade with truly no information to impart, pure distillations of the herd instinct. Like Milgram’s conformity experiments–which Wasik cites as an inspiration–there was really no conceivable reason to join in beyond social pressure, something Wasik was quite upfront about with his “subjects.” As the one-question FAQ he would circulate with his other announcements put it, the one reason to participate was that “Tons of other people are doing it” (Wasik). As Wasik writes, “Not only was the flash mob a vacuous fad; it was, in its very form (pointless aggregation and then dispersal), intended as a metaphor for the hollow hipster culture that spawned it” (Wasik). If we like to tell ourselves that information cascades really do provide a useful signal, Wasik’s “experiment” challenges such assumptions by laying bear the kernel at the heart of such behavior. We may tell ourselves that following the crowd is smart, and oftentimes it can be, but in our hearts following the crowd is often its own payoff.

Also interesting were two other groups’ responses to the flash mob fad: the media and corporations like Ford. The first quite naturally leap on the storm, creating a proper information cascade of information as bloggers and journalists all reported on it. Even more interesting was the way companies like Ford Motors tried to capitalize on the fad, hosting “Fusion Flash Concerts” to promote its new automobiles. Information cascades do not convey information after all, they only really produce it–What a given individual learns is that others seem to prefer a given choice, not the reasons behind those choices, so that every individual is in fact making decisions based on different information–so it’s only natural for actors to try to attatch their own information to the transmission.

Works Cited

Bill Wasik, “My Crowd” Harpers Magazine. Mar 2006, Vol. 312 Issue 1870, p56-66.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/03/0080963