Andy Carvin написал в 2006 очень хорошую статью
Belarus, Flash Mobs and the Ice Cream Revolution.
Которую он удалил 🙂
Updated 07/11/2023
Belarus, Flash Mobs and the Ice Cream Revolution
Veronica Khokhlova of Global Voices recently posted a blurb about a group of young people in Belarus who were arrested for organizing an ice cream social.
For those of you who don’t follow eastern European affairs, Belarus is one of the most authoritarian states of the former Soviet bloc, shutting down independent media and quashing all forms of public protest. Yet a determined group of Internet-savvy young people are pushing back by organizing gatherings through the use of flash mobs. A flash mob is a sudden, seemingly spontaneous activity planned through rapid transmission of announcements over the Internet, SMS text messaging and other communication devices. In many countries, flash mobs are often seen as communal practical jokes or even performance art, with hordes of participants suddenly showing up in a public place, doing something irreverent, then vanishing without a trace.
In Belarus, young people are employing flash mobs to push the boundaries of what the government will tolerate in terms of free assembly. Last Friday, flash mobbers descended upon a public square in the capital Minsk to gather together and eat ice cream. No rally, no speeches, no sit-in nor march – just standing around and eating ice cream:
If this were almost any other country in the world, standing around eating ice cream wouldn’t even cause the local authorities to bat an eyelash. In Belarus, though, it was treated as an organized public assembly, so plainclothes government agents broke up the event, arresting some of the young participants:
How did the authorities know about the protest? They probably monitored the websites used to plan the flash mob, like this livejournal site. As reported on the Transitions Online Belarus blog,
Flashmobs are becoming an essential part of the Belarusian protest movement. The youth uses Internet to get organized, predominantly through the online communities at LiveJournal (there are specific communities for just the purposes of mobbing- http://community.livejournal.com/by_mob/, for example).The problem with all of that is that KGB is reading those online communities as well, so there are usually security people present at the flashmobs even before they start. It is even getting quite uncanny to read about the plans for a flashmob on Thursday and then read how many people got arrested on Friday-all on the same LiveJournal page.
The blog goes on to ponder whether it’s time for Belarus flash mobbers to make their planning a little more clandestine.
What I could never understand is why the flashmob community never went for an online discussion forum that would be more secure and would require registration, so as to prevent the security people from reading the details…Could be a special password protected blog or a yahoogroup: both are easily implementable, and, if our flashmobbers are so picky, can be syndicated via RSS.
Techniques like this, or perhaps using an email-SMS relay like I recently discussed on my blog, might help decrease the chances of flash mobbers getting arrested. Unless, of course, the whole point of the activity is to draw attention to Belarus’ absurd zero-tolerance policy towards any kind of protest. So the question remains whether these flash mobs are merely an attempt to rebel against authority in a relatively harmless way or test the waters for much bigger public actions against the government. For all we know, maybe the Ice Cream Revolution began last Friday. -andy
Posted by acarvin at May 15, 2006 10:25 AM
/
Особое внимание рекомендую уделить выводам и рекомендациям.
А, так почему из таких “фотографий” никто не делает медиа-событие?
