Mob Manchester

A flash mob hit Manchester’s Market Street at the weekend with the express purpose of paying homage to the king of pop. For those of you not familiar with a ‘flash mob’, no flashing is involved – at least not generally and certainly not in this case. It involves a large group of people descending on a public place and all performing a pre-arranged action – this can range from a simple ‘everyone lie on the floor for a minute’, to pillow fights and ‘everyone wear a santa outfit' to the increasingly popular dance flash mobs – where everyone performs the same organised dance routine. The idea behind the whole thing is that people (normally students) like to feel like they’ve been involved in something a little bit ‘crazy’, because, you know, lying on the floor in the middle of a shopping centre is so out there.

This current trend for dancing ones is a little more understandable, if somewhat more difficult to organise. Anyone can lie on the floor but how can you guarantee that everyone turning up for a dance mob is going to be any good at dancing? Well, you can’t, as evidenced by this video – kudos for trying though and putting Manchester on the ‘flash mob’ map.



Here’s a couple more on a slightly bigger and it has to be said more successful scale. This one was organised for advertising purposes by a mobile phone company:



People standing still confuses Americans: