Flash Mobs, Spectatorship and the Collapse of Belief in the Critical Public Sphere
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the modes of spectatorship that inhere in flash-mob activities through an analysis of online video clips in which they are represented. By including the mediated afterlife of flash mobs as a central component of the practice, it becomes possible to understand them as a manifestation of normalized networked social relations rather than as a rupture with everyday life. I argue that flash-mob videos and the corresponding practices in actual space mediate and reproduce an economy of enjoyment in which spectators gain a contradictory sense of mastery over everyday life. The lure of participatory culture fuels a growing comfort with a system of democratized surveillance that is a central feature of social relations in control society. In flash mobs, the appropriation of public space on one hand and the use of new communication technologies on the other are seen by some to implicitly represent a contestation of power by means of democratic forms of organization. An analysis of how online technologies shape the social, cultural and political imaginary of participants, in contrast to an instrumentalist understanding of how they enable certain practices, allows a more measured assessment of the political possibilities of online communities. Rather than understand the seemingly spontaneous participation in flash mobs as subversive, I argue that the irrationality touted by flash mobbers is a symptom of a collapse of belief in the critical public sphere under late capitalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".