Alright you flash mobsters, stop sending me rude messages since I supposedly spoiled your master plan by spilling the beans on your event last week. What you did was old hat, passe even before you actually did it in Causeway Bay. People have been doing it for years - for a purpose. The only difference with you parrots is that you did it because a few hundred people did it in New York first.
To put things in perspective, here is the real, brief history of flash mobbing, compiled with a little help from my colleague Neil Taylor and an erudite reader of this column from Apple Daily. 1973: American science fiction-writer Larry Niven predicts the omnipresence of media and technology will create roving rioters without a cause, people whom he calls 'flash crowds'.
'I needed new words and phrases to describe the social development in Flash Crowd, a novelette [set] in the near future,' Niven wrote in a recent essay.
'Newstaper. The reader can guess that he's a reporter... The better the news coverage and the better the transportation, the bigger the crowd that gathers around anything interesting. With a teleporting society patrolled by roving newstapers, you get instant mobs that expand further as publicity hounds, pickpockets, and looters teleport in. I called these flash crowds.' Hear the words of the master, you mobsters: we, the media, have created you.
1990s - present: China is a pioneer in flash mobbing, not New York. Underground Christian sects and Falun Gong on the mainland have been using the internet, e-mails and cell phones to plan meetings and quick escapes when they hear word of an impending police raid.
2000-2003: Anti-globalisation mobs plan schedules, announce meetings and rallying points on the World Wide Web and co-ordinate rallies on cell phones in Seattle, Paris, Ottawa and Brussels.
