I’ve heard unsubstantiated rumors that the Jefferson 1 was known to bust out a tune or two in her younger days. So should this whole flashmobbing thing not pan out, perhaps she has a future as a pop star overseas. In Germany, it seems, she’s the hottest thing since Hasselhoff.
Sven Borkert lays out the basics, decries America’s seizing the last imaginable shreds of liberty, and links to Jason’s blog post over at Sven’s Blog.
Writing at the site homo sociologicus, Martin Booker imagines the incident as a meditation on sociologist Erving Goffman’s theories of symbolic interaction.
It’s probably rare that the organizers of flashmobs actually have this sociological motivation, yet through their actions – some more, some less – they take the standard order and hold it up to a mirror. And because Web 2.0 makes everything so easy and new media is so cheap, the results can be published in no time at all, and made accessible on YouTube etc.. Were Goffman still among us, he’d probably spend a lot of time on the Internet!
Except, of course, he said it in German, a language I haven’t spoken regularly in more than a decade, so that translation may be spotty, at best. Anyway, here’s the original:
Die Organisatoren von Flashmobs haben zwar wohl nur selten diese sozialwissenschaftliche Motivation, dennoch zeigen die Aktionen – manche mehr, manche weniger – genau diese Normenordnungen auf und halten ihr den Spiegel vor. Und weil das Web 2.0 alles so leicht macht und neue Medien so billig sind, können die Ergebnisse in kürzester Zeit für alle zugänglich auf YouTube u.ä. veröffentlicht werden. Würde Goffman noch unter uns weilen, er würde höchstwahrscheinlich viel Zeit im Internet verbringen!
Hey Ray,
Your translation is quite right. Indeed I think Goffman would have had something to say on the incident. What basically happened was that some people broke the unwritten rules of the interaction order.
Without realizing it, we’re always skating on thin ice in everyday life as we adhere to social norms that we take as given. Now when somebody comes and brakes those norms in whatever way (which hardly evver happens), we are suddenly confronted with something we didn’t expect.
Dancing in the Jefferson memorial is completely harmless and doesn’t hurt anyone. Yet the reaction of the security personnel is excessive. This wonderfully illustrates how strong some people feel about norms, normality and everyday routine and what kind of consequences we can suffer when we try to break out – even with completely harmless activities.
I think that is what Goffman would have had to say. It’s a bit like one of those crisis experiments he so loved.
What’s wrong with David Hasselhof, by the way? He single-handedly brought down the Berlin Wall, so Germans really have something to thank him for.
atb, Martin
By: martinbooker on April 17, 2008
at 7:49 am
Ach, excuse my English. It should have read “what’s wrong ‘about’ Hasselhoff?” We all know what’s wrong ‘with’ him I guess…
By: martinbooker on April 19, 2008
at 1:07 pm