The draw of the crowd

It’s Friday. Lovely.

Off the back of my below  A Lesson in Leadership post, I was thinking of how this translates into more real, everyday situations. Derek Siver emphasises the importance of the ‘leader’ (dancing guy) and the “crucial” first followers, but I think the real relevance lies in the opportunity it offers individuals to lose themselves in something big, impulsive, unorganised and completely open, whilst at the same time creating a level of safety through a consciousness of kind.

You see this all the time at festivals, as partipants construct a temporary community in which the laws of the real world tend not to apply. Robert Kozinets wrote a great paper on this centred around his experiences at The Burning Man Festival. It’s not difficult to get involved in these social snowballs either.

Now, however, Facebook and Twitter are allowing these experience to become fairly ubiquitous – Made by Many’s Tim Malbon cites a couple of Facebook and Twitter hashtag examples (e.g. fisting as a Twitter trending topic). The recent Unofficial Breast Cancer Campaign on Facebook is another great example of this. Women across the world were asked to create seemingly suggestive statuses, which in fact told us where they like to put their handbags down when they get home: “I like it on the desk”, “I like it on the kitchen table”. Arguably, this didn’t do much for the charity itself, but it does show the potential power (and speed) of the crowd.

You can see the beginnings of this sort of stuff in chain mail and the ridiculous ‘send this to 10 of your friends or the ghost of a dead girl who was lost in the woods will visit you in your sleep tonight’ posts that used to circulate inboxes, MSN and so on. The difference is that these hold a level of meaning and social relevance. They’re an invitation to become part of something big with little trepidation of the social consequences.

Of course, you cannot underestimate the importance of the first few, as without them, the movement/dance/hashtag/status updates etc would never get off the ground.