This video, of a lone guy starting a flash dance mob at a festival, is bouncing all over the web this week. I love it. Then I wondered, is this really spontaneous? It’s too perfect! But it’s really compelling either way. It plays on how we humans are wired. One guy alone dancing alone is weird. But when the tipping point happens, everyone wants to join. I wonder what happened when the music stopped.
Of course, I love that fact it’s one of my new favorite artists who is playing, Santigold’s Unstoppable.
Hallo John,
thank you for this video. I made the same experience with a social sculpture. Put 60.000 blue balls in the middle of german citys (10.000 each city) and left the people alone with the sculpture. What happend? Babies startet to enter the sculpture, then kids, then … even policemen. After one hour kids startet to sell bags to the people for to save as much balls as possible (in nuce the birth of capitalism). (Lots of mistakes in this abstract? = Sorry, I’m not a native speaker, living in Germany.)
But why talking, just have a look:
It’s a little strange, the herd/sheep mentality that the video ends with. The first few people joining in was fun to watch…but when the mass of previously sedentary people suddenly joined in after watching everyone else do it, it became an interesting social experiment in peer pressure/herd mentality.
SO much beer, looks like a fake thing. So many people want to join that wierd thing? It’s fake.
Is the guy drinking or drugging? Perhaps.
Is it weird? Who’s to judge? To me,he seems to have found his blissful time & place. I’m a tad envious.
I find the tipping point most curious. When is it? What is it? Is it the music, a factor of time or number of people?
BTW, there’s considerable other video of this on You-Tube that suggests it is indeed spontaneous.
I’ved watched the other videos related to “dancing guy at Sasquatch” and apparently he was dancing like this all day, other videos from other people around the festival. It’s great to watch how suddenly after guy three it reaches critical mass and everyone feels free to join in.
I was there and this was most definitely spontaneous. You just saw people running across the lawn to join in within minutes.
Sheeeeeit people…stop debating whether it’s “real” or not. This is what people in the real world do. It’s not a “flash mob”. Get out from behind your computers and into the world!