Flash mobs show darker side

The commercial is funny, the one about the guy with the slow cell phone who starts his own "flash mob" performance a half-hour too early, but recent Wall Street trading sessions point up the dangers of a mob mentality.

Now the technology that made the flash mob possible is showing its darker side as well.

On the Fourth of July, a thousand teenagers, attracted to the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights through social networking sites, started fighting and nearly overwhelmed police.

Ongoing rioting and looting in England has been blamed on groups of youths using Twitter, text and instant messaging to stay ahead of police, and "flash robberies" have been organized at stores around the world.

The economy isn't helping.

"You are essentially having a world where you have 25 million people who are underemployed and 2 percent of the population doing better than they ever have," said Jonathan Taplin, director of the innovation lab at the University of Southern California's Anenberg School for Communication. "Why wouldn't that lead to some sort of social unrest? Why wouldn't people use the latest technologies to effect that?" he told the Associated Press.

Lawmakers are getting in the act, of course, moving to outlaw such use of a social networking site, but civil libertarians are fighting back.

And businesses are keeping track of Twitter and Facebook mentions of their stores to try to prevent such mayhem.

There's nothing new about social unrest and human proclivity for larceny, but what is new is the ability of the Internet to magnify those characteristics.

Those charged with maintaining order, and those with a stake in it, will have to adapt to stay ahead of those who would take advantage of them.