An Interview I Never Imagined I'd Have

Last night was the Bill Wasik interview. When I asked him what led him to plan the first flash mob, he talked about chain e-mails--you know, those annoying ones that say if you forward it to 10 people, your crush will ask you out, or if you don't, some horror movie-esque thing will crawl out of your face and kill you? Yeah thouse things--and how he thought about bringing it out into physical space. Sounds familiar... doesn't it? I read a paper on that early on, when I first started. I also asked him about the violent ones in Philadelphia and other cities, and the answer shocked me, but also made sense. He pointed out that they are the closest ones, that are currently around, to his original concept: the physical overwhelming of an area due to the use of a network online. Even the question about his favorite flash mob brought up some information--it was the worshiping of the dinosaur in Toys R Us by the way--it was the first time he saw just how overwhelming and powerful the phenomenon could become. His experiment with networking has exploded into something so much bigger, a world-wide ripple effect, with flash mobs not just in New York, not just in the country, but across the world.