Etymologie, Etimología, Étymologie, Etimologia, Etymology, (griech.) etymología, (lat.) etymologia, (esper.) etimologio
US Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika, Estados Unidos de América, États-Unis d'Amérique, Stati Uniti d'America, United States of America, (esper.) Unuigintaj Statoj de Ameriko
Veranstaltungen, Espectáculo, Manifestation, Allestimento, Event, (esper.) eventoj

flash mob (W3)

Flash Mobbery or Flashmobbery (flash mob + robbery)
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"Flash mob" is a term from 2003 to describe a sudden "mob" of people, such as for a public performance art project.

"Flashmobbery" has been cited in print since 2006 and "flash mobbery" since at least 2008.

"Flash mobber" or "flahsmobbery" ("flash mob" + "robbery") became a popular term in 2011, when many of the flash mobs were assembled to rob convenience stores.
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Commission générale de terminologie et de néologie

Journal officiel du 15/08/2010

frz. "mobilisation éclair"

Domaine : Tous domaines

Définition : Rassemblement impromptu de personnes averties par minimessage ou par l'internet.

Équivalent étranger : "flash mob" (en)

'Flash bash' gangs of teenage thugs threaten peace of seaside resorts
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The Sunday Independent has learned that the so-called "flash bash" - a violent take on the "flash mob" dance phenonemon on social media - confrontations are being organised by gangs of teenagers from rival neighbourhoods.
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flash mob

locution nominale, féminin?.  [société]. Sorte de "manif-éclair".

Le phénomène a pris naissance début 2003 à New York. Le principe est simple : quelques centaines de personnes se donnent discrètement rendez-vous dans un lieu public par des moyens ultra-modernes comme le bon vieux SMS, et se mettent à faire n'importe quoi.

Pour le moment ces happenings ont un caractère bon enfant

About

"Flash Mob" refers to any online-coordinated event in which an ad-hoc group of participants meet up at a central location for various purposes. While certain "flash mobs" may convey a political or commercial message, they are usually organized for the spontaneous amusement of the participants and bewilderment of bystanders.

Origin

The concept of improvising a public assembly was first denoted as a "smart mob" in author Howard Rheingold’s book "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution" published in 2002. The term "flash mob" was coined a year later on June 16th, 2003 by New York City-based experience designer Sean Savage in a blog post reporting on "inexplicable mobs" in New York City organized via email by Bill Wasik, who was a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine at the time.
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flash bash - "violent take on the 'flash mob'" ADSGarson O'Toole

• Antedating of "flash mob", n.2 Hugo
• Antedating of "flash mob", n.2 Hugo
• Antedating of "flash mob", n.2 Hugo

The Third Moscow Zombie Parade, a flashmob, gathered on May 15th.

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The first major flash mob event took place in June 2003, when in Macy's department store in New York, around 100 people gathered around a rug in the 9th floor carpet department.
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"flash mob": Origin: Formed within English, by compounding. Etymons: "flash" n.2, "mob" n.2

Compare earlier "Flash Crowd", the title of a 1973 science fiction story by U.S. writer Larry Niven, in which very large crowds assemble instantaneously through the use of teleportation devices.

orig. U.S.

A large group of people organized by means of the Internet, or mobile phones or other wireless devices, who assemble in public to perform a prearranged action together and then quickly disperse.
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Limericks on "flash mob"

"Foule-éclair"

Le 9 octobre 2003, l'esplanade de la Place-des-Arts, à Montréal, a vu se rassembler une foule-éclair. Mais de quoi s'agit-il exactement?

C'est un rassemblement social créé à l'initiative d'un internaute anonyme, qui invite des dizaines d'autres internautes à se rassembler en un lieu physique précis, à un moment déterminé, et à exécuter tous ensemble un scénario comique, voire absurde, déjà élaboré, puis à se disperser dans toutes les directions, quelques secondes plus tard.

Ainsi, les Montréalais et Montréalaises présents dans la foule-éclair ce jour-là entre 13 h 19 et 13 h 22 ont crié « Coin-coin! » et ont jeté dans le bassin plus de deux cents canards en plastique jaune!

Ce mouvement ("flash mob", en anglais) est né à New York et s'est répandu dans les grandes villes du monde. Il vise à rompre la monotonie du quotidien tout en permettant à des gens qui ne se connaissent pas de participer à une activité marginale commune.

Terminologie extraite du Grand dictionnaire terminologique, consultable gratuitement dans ce site.

flash mob

"flash mob": A large public gathering at which people perform an unusual or seemingly random act and then disperse, typically organized by means of the Internet or social media.

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Bill Wasik, senior editor of Harper's Magazine, orchestrated the first successful flash mob in June 2003 at Macy's department store. A group of 100 people received instructions to gather at one of four staging areas. Further directions led them to the store's rug department, where they told employees they lived together and were shopping for a "love rug".
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A "FlashMob supercomputer" is a group of computer enthusiasts who gather together in one physical location for a brief time period in order to function as a supercomputer and work on a single problem. Modeled after the "flash mob" fad that was popular during the summer of 2003, "FlashMob supercomputing" involves gathering together interested participants who are willing to bring their laptops and PCs to a pre-determined location.
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"flash mob": About 1,570 results

Bill Wasik (der "Erfinder" von "flash mob") auf Twitter

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Started by journalist Bill Wasik, this chain e-mail marked the birth of what has become known as "flash mobs". Individuals convene in a public place for a brief period of time and perform a strange and contrived act before dispersing as suddenly as they first appeared. While Wasik conceptualized the "MOB project" as a social experiment, it did not take long for "flash mobs" to become political. By the end of 2003, "flash mobs" had spread to various parts of Europe, Asia, Latin America and Australia, protesting everything from consumerism, to homophobia, to Philippine President Joseph Estrada. The 2004 Madrid train bombings sparked a spontaneous mobile phone message campaign resulting in public demonstrations against the conservative Spanish government, which was later defeated in the national election. Just last year, Belarusian bloggers used the internet to organize "flash mobs" in Minsk protesting the arrest of democracy activists after a flawed national election.
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The first "flash mob" — "a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and pointless act for a brief time, then quickly disperse" — took place in Manhattan in May 2003. (Source: Wikipedia.)
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Groping for what to call these events, the media christened them "flash mobs" — lumped them in, that is, with the fad in which large crowds carry out a public performance and then post the results on YouTube. So at around the same time that Fox was running a lighthearted "flash-mob reality show" called "Mobbed", and Friends With Benefits, the high-grossing rom-com starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, featured a "flash-mob dance" in Times Square, pundits and public officials suddenly began railing against "flash mobs" as a threat to public order. The convenience store knock-overs became "flash mob robberies", or even "flash robs". “The evolution of "flash mobs" from pranks to crime and revolution,” declared one of my local papers, the San Francisco Examiner, after the hacktivist group Anonymous had helped to create subway shutdowns.

Here is where the story got a bit uncomfortable for me personally. The Examiner‘s flash-mob timeline, which ended in a terrifying stew of rioting and revolution, literally began with my name. Back in 2003, as a sort of social experiment, I sent an email to friends and asked them to forward it along, looking to gather "inexplicable mobs" of people around New York. Then, over the span of just a couple of months, I watched in amazement as my prank turned into a worldwide fad. I should add that the first "flash mobs" weren’t like either the Friends With Benefits kind or the burn-and-loot kind—or, maybe I should say, they were a little like both. Like the happy mobs, they were good-natured spectacles, and they often involved the crowd performing some benign group action: bowing before a robotic dinosaur, making birdcalls in Central Park. Like the violent mobs, though, they were highly spontaneous; the crowd was told where they were going and what they would do there only minutes beforehand. And the goal of the get-togethers was not to entertain but, if I may borrow a phrase, to “link up and cause havic.”

I even called my events “mobs,” as a wink to the scary connotations of a large group gathered for no good reason. But I didn’t come up with the name "flash mob" — that honor belongs to Sean Savage, a UC Berkeley grad student who was blogging about my events and the copycats as they happened. He added the word “flash” as an analogy to a flash flood, evoking the way that these crowds (which in the original version arrived all at once and were gone in 10 minutes or less) rushed in and out like water from a sudden storm. Savage and I never met while the original mobs were still going on, but today we work just a block away from each other in San Francisco—me at Wired, him at Frog Design, where he’s an interaction designer—so we now can get together and commiserate about what’s become of our mutual creation. It had been bad enough to see the term get appropriated by Oprah to describe a ridiculous public dance party featuring the Black Eyed Peas. Now the media was stretching the term to include just about any sort of group crime. “It means everything and nothing now,” Savage says morosely.

One reason the term "flash mob" stuck back in 2003 was its resonance, among some sci-fi fans who read Savage’s blog, with a 1973 short story by Larry Niven called “Flash Crowd.” Niven’s tale revolved around the effects of cheap teleportation technology, depicting a future California where “displacement booths” line the street like telephone booths. The story is set in motion when its protagonist, a TV journalist, inadvertently touches off a riot with one of his news reports. Thanks to teleportation, the rioting burns out of control for days, as thrill-seekers use the booths to beam in from all around to watch and loot. Reading “Flash Crowd” back in 2003, I hadn’t seen much connection to my own mobs, which I intended as a joke about the slavishness of fads. I laughed off anyone who worried about these mobs getting violent. In 2011, though, it does feel like Niven got something chillingly correct. He seems especially prescient in the way he describes the interplay of curiosity, large numbers, and low-level criminality that causes his fictional riots to grow. “How many people would be dumb enough to come watch a riot?” the narrator asks. “But that little percentage, they all came at once, from all over the United States and some other places, too. And the more there were, the bigger the crowd got, the louder it got—the better it looked to the looters … And the looters came from everywhere, too.”
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The second factor in crowd violence, in Stott’s view, is simply what he calls power: the perception within a crowd that it has the ability to do what it wants, to take to the streets without fear of punishment. This, in turn, is largely a function of sheer size—and just as with legitimacy, small gradations can make an enormous difference. We often think about "flash mobs" and other Internet-gathered crowds as just another type of viral phenomenon, the equivalent of a video that gets a million views instead of a thousand. But in the physical world, the distance separating the typical from the transformational is radically smaller than in the realm of bits. Merely doubling the expected size of a crowd can create a truly combustible situation.
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Every disorderly "flash mob" that I’ve mentioned in this story has been, at root, a mega-underground phenomenon. In many cases, this brings us back around to the uncomfortable subject of race. In the US, the biggest and most important of the urban "flash mobs" that politicians have railed against (and that right-wingers now fret about as representing the specter of black insurrection) weren’t gathered by calls to violence, as in London. Instead, they were essentially about African-American teenagers showing their numbers, about kids taking over—for a brief window of time—some highly visible public spaces where they normally feel less than welcome. In Kansas City, a police investigation found that the mobs in April 2010 were gathered via Facebook, bringing between 700 and 900 kids to the aptly named Country Club Plaza, lined with plush stores. The Philadelphia mobs that same spring were touched off by a popular dance crew called Team Nike, who tweeted about the public performances they were giving; as in LA, though, these tweets got widely forwarded with an eye toward creating impromptu street parties on South Street and at the Gallery mall. Elijah Anderson, a Yale sociologist and Philly native who studies poor urban communities, has coined the term “cosmopolitan canopy” to describe these kinds of spaces. They’re the places where people of different races and class backgrounds come together, which makes them the closest thing we have today to a commons; for teens, especially poorer teens, the cosmopolitan canopy represents society and authority in the way that a statehouse or bank headquarters ought to but doesn’t.
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Episode 519: Animal Rites »

An animal rights group is implicated in the death of a researcher. A "flash mob" on the Cal-Sci campus complicates matters, and soon a full-scale rescue effort is necessary. More »

Math used: shuffling, Markov chains, Galileo

Are you a math genius? - Puzzle: Two Shuffles »

"flash mob", n., a spontaneous, electronically-organized gathering in a public place for no particular purpose, a play on flash flood.

A large group of people who gather in a usually predetermined location, perform some brief action, and then quickly disperse.
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World Wide Words -- 06 Sep 03
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2. Turns of Phrase: "Flash mob"

In the middle of June, groups of people began to congregate in New York without warning to carry out some daft action - the first was in May, but the one that hit the news was on 15 June, when a crowd of 200 materialised in Macy's department store in Manhattan, supposedly in search of a $10,000 "love rug". The next, on 2 July, formed in the mezzanine of the Grand Hyatt Hotel and did nothing but burst into applause on cue. Such absurdist crowds are assembled through instructions passed from person to person using e-mail, text messaging and other instant media.

The figure behind these New Yorker "flash mobs" is known only as Bill. His Mob Project aims periodically to create inexplicable but peaceful gatherings somewhere in New York for just ten minutes at a time. Copycat schemes quickly sprouted in big cities all over America and the idea was soon exported to many other countries.

Was this just a manifestation of Silly-Season hot-summer madness, or was there more to it? One pointer to its being rather more than the fashion of a moment is that several verbal compounds of the name have already been formed, including "flash mobber" and "flash mobbing", as well as the abbreviation "mobber", always a sign of a term that has hit the collective unconscious. Some commentators argue that it is actually a reflection of a sense of alienation among young people, while others fear it has been so successful an idea that it will not be long before others adopt the concept for less benign purposes.

The "flash mob" phenomenon is part sanctioned insanity, part Seinfeld on the loose, part nonsensical wanderings through city streets en masse.

[Christian Science Monitor, 4 Aug. 2003]

Even the usually staid Swiss are getting into the act. During one recent flash mob scene at the Zurich railway station, flash mobbers formed a long single-file line with hands linked, dividing the station.

[Toronto Star, 5 Aug. 2003]

flash mob