On flash mobs, take two

On Saturday 20 March, there was a flash mob on South Street. Jeff Deeney, in discussing his perspective on Philadelphia youth flash mobs over at Phawker, wonders what really happened, considering the Philadelphia media's tendency to play up scary stories for their suburban readers and viewers when it comes to minority youth in the city:

But was there even a flash mob? When the story first broke I spent hours scouring Twitter and Facebook looking for evidence of a trail I could track back to those calling for a flash mob, and couldn't find it. I was able to find exactly [one] Twitter feed whose user mentioned getting texts about going to South Street, which, on the first warm Saturday night of the year, most kids would have done anyway. Now Gawker has reported that the flash mob was nothing more than performances by couple dance troupes that got out of control. The fact that the police department was calling it a flash mob organized on social networking sites should have been taken with a grain of salt because anyone who's worked with the department knows that your average Philly cop is CAPS LOCK GUY who still has an AOL account, isn't exactly up on new trends online, and might not be the most reliable source for this kind of information.

I don't doubt that a lot of Philly police officers are behind the times when it comes to using the Internet. And I also don't doubt that the Inky and other media outlets are desperate to do what they can for pageviews and TV ratings.

I participated in the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, and I saw firsthand what happens after tens of thousands of people march peacefully for hours, and then the media notices a few knuckleheads breaking windows after most of the marchers have started to leave for home. All that America saw on the evening news was a few seconds of sensational footage of the window-breakers wearing balaclavas, and none of the hours of footage of pre-teens and their parents wearing rollerblades.

But that said, I also saw firsthand the flash mob on South Street on the 20th. Since I live a half-block from South Street, I know what the usual summer weekend crowds are like. When I got to my front door about 9:30 after seeing a movie with a friend, I saw that the crowd that night was not the usual summer weekend crowd. The people were younger and noisier. There were more people than usual, and they were even less courteous to passersby on the sidewalk. They weren't going in and out of shops; they weren't eating slices of pizza or carrying shopping bags; they weren't stopping in the bars and restaurants. They were pushing around, they were loud, and they were rowdy.

Call me a hopeless bourgeois, but when I see a mass of young people on my neighborhood main street who are clearly not spending money there, I smell trouble. The vibe on South Street that night wasn't one of a bunch of people taking leisurely walks up and down the street and checking each other out. The vibe wasn't one of people from the neighborhood getting out for the first warm weekend evening of spring after a long, cold, lonely winter. It was a few thousand teens looking for mischief.

Now, whether they all got there through Twitter or some other social networking technology, I don't know. So maybe Jeff's right, and it shouldn't properly be called a "flash mob." And I'm sure that the media took only the scariest YouTube videos and only the interviews with the most shocked suburbanites to put on TV and in the paper. I don't want to get on Jeff's case -- aren't we overdue for another lunch together, dude? -- but I hope he hasn't given his readers the impression that South Street wasn't a little nervewracking that night. And I confess I'm a terrible NIMBY when it comes to flash mobs.