With the Advent of modern social media, like facebook and twitter, have come amazing possibilities for radical social movements, political change, and orchestrated chaos. This post is more concerned with the sinister side of the possibility for arousing the masses, especially with it's potential for causing havoc, destruction, and crime. The following video shows a mob of teens entering various locations and openly, irreverently, robbing the store and intimidating the shop clerk. I keep waiting for someone to yell "april fools!" but it never happens.
What is it about being in a large crowd that suddenly makes it seem "more okay" to do these things? How is it, that if a couple of your friends are doing something that you don't feel good about, that if you start doing it, it becomes more and more "okay" the longer that you do it? Is the impulse to "move with the mob" a biological remnant of evolutionary history? I remember being at a reggae show in Jamaica about 7 years ago, which was mostly locals, and in kind of a rough area of town. It was standing room only, and I recall one attendant brandishing a switchblade and pacing around, chanting "I'm gonna murder him..." My Boyfriend and I kept our distance, but we took it to be the effect of the drugs. Suddenly, the entire crowd started running to my left. I didn't stop to think about why they were running, I followed my gut instinct and ran in the same direction as everyone else(as fast as I could.) Nothing that I had experienced at Ozzfest could have prepared me for this! After three or four incidences of this, we ended up imposing upon our very amicable Jamaican driver, who had generously driven us quite a distance and allowed us to come with him on his day off, to drive us home early.
definition of a sociopath: A person who commits malicious acts or crimes involving deception, who exhibits lack of concern for the safety of others, and has a reduced capacity for feelings of shame or remorse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
What is it about being in a large crowd that suddenly makes it seem "more okay" to do these things? How is it, that if a couple of your friends are doing something that you don't feel good about, that if you start doing it, it becomes more and more "okay" the longer that you do it? Is the impulse to "move with the mob" a biological remnant of evolutionary history? I remember being at a reggae show in Jamaica about 7 years ago, which was mostly locals, and in kind of a rough area of town. It was standing room only, and I recall one attendant brandishing a switchblade and pacing around, chanting "I'm gonna murder him..." My Boyfriend and I kept our distance, but we took it to be the effect of the drugs. Suddenly, the entire crowd started running to my left. I didn't stop to think about why they were running, I followed my gut instinct and ran in the same direction as everyone else(as fast as I could.) Nothing that I had experienced at Ozzfest could have prepared me for this! After three or four incidences of this, we ended up imposing upon our very amicable Jamaican driver, who had generously driven us quite a distance and allowed us to come with him on his day off, to drive us home early.
definition of a sociopath: A person who commits malicious acts or crimes involving deception, who exhibits lack of concern for the safety of others, and has a reduced capacity for feelings of shame or remorse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
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