Public Writing: Essentially a Social Service

Flash Mobs

               Flash mobs are always fun to watch but before class today, I never really saw them as serving a purpose greater than to just entertain. What I mean is, I never saw what a flash mob does as actually something other than entertaining. After class today, I saw the effects flash mobs have after looking into the seven characteristics regarding publics by Michael Warner and analyzing them in context of a YouTube video.

Characteristics:

1. A public is self-organized - This characteristic is easy to see as a public audience starts to gather once everyone notices that a flash mob is occurring. It also seems, through prior experiences, that organized actions lead to organized reactions. Many other genres of demonstrations illustrate this such as the "organized" protest in Turkey which lead to an "organized" reaction by the police. However, the opposite can be noted as well as when the police started harming innocent people, the people reacted in an unorganized way. Basically a public can be self-organized or even, self-unorganized.

2. A public is a relation among strangers - The flash mob also creates a relation between strangers as once the audience is engaged in the performance, the audience begins to interact with one another speaking of the amazing performance. Toward the end, when everyone claps in union, each and everyone in the audience shares a common belief that the performance was great hence, a relationship has been established.

3. The address of public speech is both personal and impersonal - Speech in this context is the dance itself and the message it proposes. It is personal because the dance and the dance moves and formations are trying to convey an important message but impersonal in the sense that no one is limited to watching the performance. Everyone can engage in the performance in one way or another.

4. A public is constituted through mere attention - Flash mobs catch people's attention simply due to the grandeur in which they are presented. When people have their eyes caught by someone or something different, they tend to congregate around that idea.

5. A public is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse - Reflexive means reactive or instinctual in this case I believe. Flash mobs cause some type of reaction. That reaction is what creates a public and puts the public into a social space depending on the public's reaction.

6. Publics act historically according to the temporality of their circulation - Flash mobs, despite their appeal, are temporary. Unlike movies, pictures, and words which can stick around forever, flash mobs only provide a glimpse into a larger message. The longer the dance, the more amount of time the audience has to digest the message. Inherently, the audience will act, or react accordingly, depending upon the mutual understanding of the message.

7. A public is poetic world making - Dance is a great form of poetry, and that too, without words. The public which forms around the dance is poetic in the sense that they all believe in something fun and purposeful; that which dance, the poetry itself, serves to fulfill.

           
               After analyzing flash mobs as a type of public "writing," it's clear to see that flash mobs are in fact a public-generating genre of speech. It meets all the conventions of public speech and as stated earlier, serves a larger purpose than to just entertain. Essentially, flash mobs, like all forms of public writing, serve a social purpose of creating a congregation and bringing people together.