Questions For Bill Wasik’ “My Crowd Experiment: The Mob Project”

Sydney Lang

10-30-17

English 110

Class C

Questions For Bill Wasik’ “My Crowd Experiment: The Mob Project”

1. Marginal Notes:

Brainstorming beyond the ideas on this page: From the first page that I selected from my annotated text, this section is touching upon one of Bill’s personal favorite mobs. This one is when people are crossing the street and ‘play-dancing,’ ‘fighting,’ hugging, and asking for the time. This brought to my attention the question, What makes this one mob so special to Bill? To go beyond this idea, and delve a little deeper I wonder if his interest is based on its uniqueness and how bizarre it is? Maybe he enjoyed its precision, with the attention to the detail of time. Or even Bill could be lured by a deeper meaning that I have yet to draw from this public display. Later in the section he introduced the ‘bandwagon effect’ mentioning Stanley Milgram and his famously unethical research studies done on his participants. By relating Milgram’s “stimulus crowd’ to a flash mob, stood out to me as I initially thought of flash mobs being innocent and never really having any negative connotations with it, now I am aware that flash mobs can be dangerous as they can put people in a standstill physically or financially, like in mob #6 that took place at the toys R us store, people were not able to move, making the location a clear risk for fire hazard.

      2.  Reading With Purpose:

How does the internet extend Bill Wasik and what does this say about the internet:

From this reading it is evident that Bill Wasik utilizes the internet as a tool. He does this in a number of manners. One of which being how he communicates to people via blogs. This method of communication is a quick and direct form of communication to essentially tell all who are listening, what you think: what your plans are, your opinions, your thoughts, your reviews. By using this form of communication he can reach out to as many people that are interested in what he is working with. The internet removes many barriers that would be present without using it as a tool. This includes how people can be connected and communicate without allowing any physical or spatial barrier to prevent them from communicating.

       3. Reading With Purpose:

Throughout this essay I found it difficult to see what exactly Bill Wasik was trying to pursue to the reader and to the general audience as a whole. Bill Wasik gave thorough details throughout his essay, and when being used correctly details can provide for a thorough understanding of what the author is reaching at, or properly conveying their purpose. In Wasik’s case however, his profuse incorporation of details drew the reader away from seeing what he is trying to pursue. Moments where Wasik’s saturation of details diluted the focus includes when he was talking about the different types of mobs and is on the topic of the bandwagon effect, and he introduces Milgram and his experiments. Through doing this he also introduces a sense of curiosity as to who Milgram was and why he is significant to this topic, thus distracting the reader. Personally I was prompted to pause my reading of his essay to look up some more information on Milgram and tie him back into Wasik’s work, which I feel should be Wasik’s job, and not the reader’s.  If Wasik’s mission and objective when writing this paper was to create a very informative and in depth  piece of work he definitely accomplished this task.