Mob Organization

When you do things in a crowd with no organization, no plan, and no clear leaders, chaos is usually the end result. And then sometimes the opposite occurs.

A few weeks ago there was a post on digg about being rickrolled. If you are not familiar with what a rickroll is, you can read about this most interesting phenomenon here.

Ha, ha! No you can't. That was actually an example of being rickrolled. You can really read about it here.

Ok, I'll stop, I promise. The real article is here. Basically what happens when you get rickrolled is somebody posts a real response or comment to a discussion at hand, and then says something like, "you can find more information on this topic here." They post a link and when you go 'there' you discover this dancing boy from the 80s. Don't think that's hilarious? Then you're an old fogy.

Anyway, back to mob organization. A person posted about this phenomenon on digg. An unusual thing happened in the comments section. The first comment was somebody making a funny joke. The second comment was somebody who posted the first line of the song. The third person posted the next part of the song. What happens next is very interesting.

Everybody who posted the next line of the song got 'dugg up'. Meaning their comments were displayed. Everybody else who made a comment other than the next line of the song, got dug down. By hundreds of people! There comments were buried, and you were left with the lyrics of the song.

Nobody said, "hey, I've got an idea, let's try this...", it just happened. hundreds of people just started all doing the same thing, and order sprung from chaos.

So, there you have it. Your daily dose of chaos theory. And speaking of chaos theory, if you want to read a great primer on this very interesting and applicable theory, you definitely should check out this site.

Or better yet, this is a fascinating site in order springing from chaos. You can get to the good stuff by jumping right to this page.