Glee, Gee and five months of dance training are apparently all you need to become an overnight Internet sensation. At least that’s all it took for a group of students, faculty and staff to jive their way from the Ohio Union to the peaks of YouTube fame.
But was the surprise dance performance really a flash mob, as its creators have dubbed it, or is it just a well-produced promo video that was destined to go viral?
All flash mobs can be measured against the original mob, organized in 2003 by Harper’s senior editor Bill Wasik. Under his guidance, more than 100 people gathered at a New York Macy’s and stood around a rug, claiming they all lived together in a warehouse and were looking for a “love rug.”
Wasik’s after-the-fact comments about the bizarre rug rabble have come to be regarded as the official definition of the flash mob and can help determine how the Buckeye mob holds up.
Pointless
The most basic definition of a flash mob requires a group of people coming from different places to gather somewhere in public and perform an unusual or pointless act before disappearing back into the crowd. So far, so good for the Union dance crew.
A more narrow definition of the mob, offered by Webster’s, says the crowd must organize the stunt over the Internet. Brutus and the gang admitted that they held weekly practices for nearly five months leading up to their performance. It clearly wasn’t a Web-only operation, but neither was the original mob. Wasik’s crew met in New York bars to receive their assignment, so OSU’s group is off the hook.
Confusion
In an interview about his social experiment, Wasik said that flash mobs give people the opportunity to confuse other people. There’s nothing incredibly confusing about a group of people dancing, but some might have been thrown for a loop when they heard “Don’t Stop Believing” playing somewhere other than a campus bar. Some people have commented online that they were confounded that the dancers opted for the “Glee” television remake of Journey’s timeless classic.
Nonconformists?
At the core of Wasik’s social experiment is a sort of satire about hipster culture and the ironic desire to be “part of the next big thing” while espousing the importance of individuality.
I don’t detect any such sarcasm as I watch President Gee strut it grinning ear to ear through a crowd of Buckeyes. My guess is that these guys and girls did it just for fun, and if it’s not highly satirical, at least it’s highly amusing.
You can’t argue success
By the broadest definition, the Journey-inspired breakdown can be called a flash mob. The love-ruggers might disagree, but that’s probably not the biggest concern among those at the Union who organized the event.
Whatever you want to call the surprise mob at the Union, it’s clear that they did it well. More than a million people have watched a few dozen Buckeyes prance around their new $113 million building, and many more are likely to follow before the clip goes the way of all ephemeral Web phenomena.
Perhaps most importantly, though, the stunt should make everyone at OSU more aware of their surroundings. Next time you’re on your way to class, or out to lunch, keep your head up — you might be in the middle of the next viral video.
