REVISED: Putting Down the Phone for a Pick-Up Jam

Our class blog assignment for this week was to put down our cell phones and actually connect with a complete stranger. At first, I did not quite know what I should do for this assignment, but the way this story played out is incredible.

Ironically, my put-down the phone anecdote begins with me picking up my cell phone! I was driving home from a friend's house on Sunday evening and listening to Radio 104.5. An announcement came onto the radio that prompted listeners to text the station. The first 20 to respond would receive passes to the Radio 104.5 Studio Session with the band named Mona. I texted in, figuring “why not?” and I won!

After arriving at the studio for Clear Channel Philadelphia and waiting for a while, we were directed back through the inner workings of the studio. We watched the two guitarists from Mona as they had an awesome acoustic performance. The video isn't up yet, but when it is it will be available here.

After Mona performed their 3 songs, all of the audience was given a Mona promotional poster. The band all sat at a table and signed everyone's poster before having their picture taken. My picture with Mona and my friend Mike can be found here, once it is uploaded.

You may ask, “Where is the connection with a stranger?” Well, after meeting with the band, we went out a doorway. There, one of the Radio 104.5 DJs, Wendy, was giving directions on how to exit the building. I approached her and asked, “Is there any possibility of a tour of the studio?”

To this, she responded with a hesitant, “Well...”

My signed poster

“I only ask because I'm an Electronic Media Major at Kutztown University,” I elaborated. She gave me a surprised look and then said that she knew Kutztown well. She then gave me her e-mail and offered me a tour at some point. She also mentioned that Clear Channel offers internships, which are a program requirement for Kutztown's Electronic Media degree.

Overall, I am incredibly pleased with the results of this assignment. I was able to connect with a complete stranger who works at a popular radio station. It is interesting that my story began by using computer mediated communication (CMC) via SMS and also that the follow-up is via e-mail, another form of CMC. Even so, without physically standing in front of Wendy, it would not have been possible for me to get a tour of the station.

From the perspective of theory, Goffman's ideas about dramaturgy apply most easily to my story. When I met with Wendy, I sought to present myself in a professional manner and control her impression of me as someone who should receive a tour. Even so, I was also in my back stage because I had come prepared to see a concert and I therefore wore jeans and a t-shirt. I also tried to compensate for this fact by holding myself upright and shaking Wendy's hand.

Retrospective: When I went to the studio tour, unlike the studio session, I dressed myself professionally and had more control over my front stage presentation since I was prepared to look the part of an attentive undergraduate student looking for an internship. I decided not to bring a camera or post pictures here in an effort to maintain my front stage, rather than exposing my camera-happy side.

Performers in Front of an Audience

To begin, the flash mob was a blast! While, I wasn't able to actually participate in laying down in the middle of the SUB, I was taking photographs instead. This gave me a unique vantage point to not only understand what it was like for the people or performers in the flash mob, but also to see the reactions of passersby and the reception of the performance.

As a thespian (read “theatre nerd”), flash mobs have always interested me because of the performance aspect. In high school, I was taught that all you need for theater is an actor and an audience. After taking speech 120, Oral Interpretation, I broadened my perspective to performance, specifically what makes a performance exactly that. In much the same way as theatre, for performance you need performers and an audience.

When, in this course, we briefly touched on performance studies, I took note that performance is not commercially reproducible. So how do these concepts of performance apply to the flash mob?

When everyone laid on the floor of the SUB, they were consciously performing for an audience. In this case the audience was just people who were passing through the SUB or sitting within the lobby. Our performance was one time only and it only took place for two minutes, so it was not reproducible in its original form (even though anybody could take pictures or record video).

The most interesting part of the flash mob, to me, was the reaction of the “audience” in the SUB. While some people just bustled through imagining that nothing was out of the ordinary (in spite of the sea of arms and legs swinging through the invisible snow), most people in the SUB stood and gawked. This reaction seems pretty normal, since it's quite a rarity for a group of 40 people to make snow angels on the floor of the lobby.

While our flash mob was a performance, new media played a pivotal role in organizing to make it possible. While everyone in the class had already met face to face in the classroom, I noticed many people using cell phones to text friends and I'm sure many participants went on facebook before hand to see if any of their friends could make it. Personally, I used new media to postpone the cycling club meeting that I was supposed to hold that day. I e-mailed all of the members to tell them of the change. In this way we all used new media's lack of geographic information to contact people who were not face to face with us and get them to come to the flash mob (or not go to the cycling meeting).

In summary, I'd say that our flash mob was a success. We got a group of people together to do something different that the campus population does not see often. I certainly believe that the people who passed through will remember this for some time to come and I know that I will always remember that time that we did a flash mob for a college course.

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