Abstract:
The convergence of ubiquitous mobile technology and Internet in the 21st century has been connecting and shaping humans in all aspects including their collective behavior. An unexpected group activity called flash mobs has been widely spread worldwide frequently since its origin at New York in 2003. What causes such human collective behavior to spread rapidly and widely? What social, economic, technological factors contribute differently to this type of human collective behavior demographically? This research is a continuing effort to gain insights into the human collective behavior of flash mobs in the 21st century. We developed a research framework based on the Melucci’s (1980) new social movement theory developed by authors for our previous studies with dimensions in social, economic, technological, and demographic parameters. Data on eight categories of significant flash mobs events gathered by an observation technique through 475 videos of YouTube in 5 geographic regions (North America, South America, Europe, African, and Asia) has been used for this study. We found that: 1.Mobile and Internet technologies are playing a critical role in shaping human collective behavior. 2. The surge of flash mobs in the 21st century strongly links to the wide and fast growing usage of mobile and Internet technologies. 3. Asian and South American countries had a strong correlation between their democracy index and the frequency of flash mobs.
