On July 16th, on Market Street in San Francisco, a few hundred people swarmed to a busy downtown crosswalk, and commenced walking back and forth across it, spinning around and waving their arms in the air.

On July 24th, between 100 to 300 people gathered at a bookstore in Rome and started asking bewildered assistants for books with imaginary titles and authors.

On July 30th, in Germany, about 75 people spontaneously appeared in a public area, and at the direction of a man with a rainbow-colored umbrella, started performing gymnastics or spun around in circles with their arms spread.

On July 31st, about 200 young people converged on a bookstore at Harvard, all looking for a greeting card for someone named “Bill.” All at once, everyone burst into applause, and the promptly left.

On August 7th, a furniture store owner returned from a visit to the pub to find 200 people gathered outside his small store. He let them inside, and everyone praised his furniture. When ten minutes had passed, every single one of them abruptly left the store and went home.

The Internet and associated telecommunication technology are acting as a catalyst to new, interesting–and potentially scary–phenomena, called “flash mobs.” Currently, the trend is relatively harmless, on the scale of pranks, in fact. And who knows, this might very well just die down and disappear after a few more months if people get tired of it.

However, there is another side to this, as organization may stem from searchable web pages, attracting a few hundred people with the same radical views into creating flash mobs for less than humorous reasons. What would happen, for example, if such a crowd were to appear and commit a crime? With so many people traipsing through a busy public area, how could any reliable evidence be collected? How could any eyewitness report who exactly did what? It could be used for any number of purposes–one can imagine the more radical anti-abortion groups making use of the technique, an example of one of many social groups not afraid to violate the law and hurt people for their cause.

I am not one of those clueless people who would decry anything negative coming from Internet technology to be a reason why we must curb the technology. It is, however, an eventuality that will likely occur, and the reaction to it should be seriously considered.