And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [13]
There was also the matter of how I would be identified. My original preference had been to remain entirely anonymous, but I had only half succeeded; at the first, aborted mob, a radio reporter had discovered my first name and broadcast it, and so I was forced to be Bill—or, more often, “Bill”—in my dealings with the media thereafter. “[L]ike Cher and Madonna, prefers to use only his first name,” wrote the Chicago Daily Herald. (To those who asked my occupation, I replied simply that I worked in the “culture industry.”) Usually a flash-mob story would invoke me roughly three quarters of the way down, as the “shadowy figure” at the center of the project. There were dark questions as to my intentions. “Bill, who denies he is on a power-trip, declined to be identified,” intoned Britain’s Daily Mirror. Here is an exchange from Fox News’s On the Record with Greta Van Susteren:
ANCHOR: Now, the guy who came up with the Mob Project is a mystery man named Bill. Do either of you know who he is? MOBBER ONE: Nope.
MOBBER TWO: Well, I’ve—I’ve e-mailed him. That’s about it. MOBBER ONE: Oh, you have ... ?
ANCHOR: What—what—who is this Bill? Do you know anything about him?
MOBBER TWO: Well, from what I’ve read, he’sa—heworks in the culture industry, and that’s—that’s about as specific as we’ve gotten with him.
As the media frenzy over the mobs grew, so did the mobs themselves. For MOB #4, I sent the mob to a shoe store in SoHo, a spacious plate-glassed corner boutique whose high ceilings and walls made of undulating mosaic gave it an almost aquatic feel, and I was astonished to see the mob assemble: as I marched with one strand streaming down Lafayette, we saw another mounting a pincers movement around Prince Street from the east, pouring in through the glass doors past the agape mouths of the attendants, perhaps three hundred bodies, packing the space and then, once no one else could enter, crowding around the sidewalk, everyone gawking, taking pictures with cameras, calling friends on cell phones (as the instructions for this mob had ordered), each pretending to be a tourist, all feigning awe—an awe I myself truly felt—to be not merely in New York but so close to the center of something so big.
Outside New York, too, the mob was multiplying in dizzying ways, far past the point that I could correspond with the leaders or even keep up with all the different new cities: not only all across the United States but London, Vienna, twenty-one different municipalities in Germany. In July, soon after New York’s MOB #4, Rome held its first two flash mobs; in the first, three hundred mobbers strode into a bookstore and demanded nonexistent titles (e.g., Pinocchio 2: The Revenge), while the second (which, based on descriptions I read later, is perhaps my favorite flash mob of any ever assembled) was held right in the Piazza dell’Esquilino, in a crosswalk just in front of the glorious Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, where the crowd broke into two and balletically crossed back and forth and met each other multiple times, first hugging, then fighting, and then asking for the time: “CHE ORE SONO?” yelled one semi-mob, and the other replied, “LE SETTE E QUARANTA”—“It’s 7:40”—which, in fact, it was exactly.
UP: THE BANDWAGON EFFECT
When a British art magazine asked me who, among artists past or present, had most influenced the flash-mob project, I named Stanley Milgram—i.e., the social psychologist best known for his authority experiments in which he induced average Americans to give seemingly fatal shocks to strangers. As it happens, I later discovered that Milgram also did a project much like a flash mob, in which a “stimulus crowd” of his confederates, varying in number from one to fifteen, stopped on a busy Manhattan sidewalk and all at once looked up to the same sixth-floor window. The results, in a chart from his paper “Notes on the Drawing Power of Crowds of Different Size”:
FIG. 1-2—MILGRAM