Smart Mobs

This week in class we discussed smart mobs. Smart mobs are people coming together and performing an action. They generally come together quickly through the use of social networks such as facebook or twiiter. Others simply use the messaging service on a phone. These mobs come together to form an action generally to protest something. As technology gets more and more advanced these mobs will grow.
A good example of this happened in 2003 where "flash mobs" (which are the same as smart mobs really) gather to do a type of performance art. The mob had a mailing list to notify people where to meet and when they did they would perform very strange acts such as admiring furniture in a store and then calling someone and talking about it without using the letter o. These flash mobs spread quickly throughout the world but also have died out since then. Still, other such mobs still exist today. Another example is the occupy wallstreet movement that has swept the nation. This is a more recent example, but it is still basically the same thing. In many major cities around the world people started to participate in the occupy wallstreet protest. It was unclear what the point of these protests where as the views differed from person to person, but the action still happened thanks to twitter and facebook.
The point I am trying to make is that smart mobs have been around for a while, but they are also growing. The occupy wallstreet protest is huge is the US, while the flash mobs performances also spread throughout the world. Even the rebels in Egypt and other middle eastern countries are a type of smart mobs as they used twitter and their phones to communicate where to meet and what to do. Smart mobs have been growing over the past few years and will only continue to grow as technology becomes more accessible to people.