flash mobs

(noun)

a group of people who assemble suddenly in a place, perform an unusual and seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment, satire, and artistic expression.

Related Terms

Examples of flash mobs in the following topics:

  • Marketing as an Entrepreneurial Force

    • ., flash mobs, crowdsourcing) to develop clever and relevant campaigns.

  • The bottom line

    • All it takes is one dishonest practice to be exposed in the media or on the Internet and in a flash, weeks, months or perhaps even years of costly consumer retribution may have to be dealt with.

  • Panic

    • These panics can sometimes lead to mob violence.
    • Recent moral panics in the UK have included the ongoing tabloid newspaper campaign against pedophiles, which led to the assault and persecution of a pediatrician by an angry, if semi-literate, mob in August 2000, and that surrounding the murder of James Bulger in Liverpool, England in 1993.

  • Introduction

    • The Flash animation above depicts the story of Jane, a student who has been studying French.
    • Flash animation and story written and developed by Emily Pitts, Daisy Barreto, Marly Paz and Matthew Flanders (2006).

  • How successful are eco-industrial parks?

    • After World War II, Finland suffered from severe energy shortages that forced Finish copper company Outokumpu to resort to ‘autogenous smelting' (or ‘flash' smelting) in which the heat produced by oxidizing metal is used to maintain smelting processes.
    • Outokumpu's flash smelter, which was the world's first, started operations in Harjavalta in 1949.

  • Organized Crime

    • An organized gang or criminal set can also be referred to as a mob.
    • Some notable patron-client networks involve the Russian and Albanian mafias, the Japanese Yakuza, the Irish mob, and the Sicilian and Italian American Cosa Nostra (i.e. the Sicilian mafia).

  • Crowds

    • When crowd behavior is directed toward a specific, violent end, the result is a mob.
    • Mobs tend to be highly emotional.
    • Examples of mob violence include the lynchings in the Southern U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries.
    • In other words, if a crowd becomes violent (a mob or riot), convergence theory would argue that this is not because the crowd encouraged violence but rather because people who wanted to become violent came together in the crowd.

  • Word of Mouth

    • Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.
    • Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.

  • Intersubjectivity of Social Meanings

    • The flash graphic above illustrating the intersubjectivity of social meanings was created by Nina Augustin and Wan-Ting Huang (2002).

  • Simultaneity

    • A flash of light is given off at the center of the traincar just as the two observers pass each other.
    • The observer standing on the platform, on the other hand, sees the rear of the traincar moving toward the point at which the flash was given off and the front of the traincar moving away from it.
    • Thus, the flashes of light will strike the ends of the traincar at different times.