TEA PARTY AND THE WISDOM OF THE MOBS

TEA PARTY AND THE WISDOM OF THE MOBS

by Ivan Osorio

In The Wall Street Journal, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, of Instapundit fame, describes the ways in which today’s “tea party” protests signal a new era of political activism.

So who’s behind the Tax Day tea parties? Ordinary folks who are using the power of the Internet to organize. For a number of years, techno-geeks have been organizing “flash crowds” — groups of people, coordinated by text or cellphone, who converge on a particular location and then do something silly, like the pillow fights that popped up in 50 cities earlier this month. This is part of a general phenomenon dubbed “Smart Mobs” by Howard Rheingold, author of a book by the same title, in which modern communications and social-networking technologies allow quick coordination among large numbers of people who don’t know each other.

In the old days, organizing large groups of people required, well, an organization: a political party, a labor union, a church or some other sort of structure. Now people can coordinate themselves.