Jeremiah Owyang (or should I say @jowyang) tweeted a link this afternoon that caught my eye: Facebook users flashmob and destroy award winning garden. Who should pay damages?
(As an aside, “tweeted a link” has fabulous possibilities as a euphemism.)

A quick recap: a Facebook campaign riled up 300+ social networkers to stage a real-life water fight in Millenium Square Garden in Leeds (which, if we’re going to get specific, had won flower show awards and was a symbol of the city’s relationship with Nelson Mandela)… completely busting it up with their water guns and buckets.

A web-based flashmob destroys a real world garden… Just in a metaphorical sense, how awesome is that as narrative frame? In addition to the fact that I was antsy to come up with some clever (okay… lame) title riffing off “The Mob of Eden” or “Social Serpents” or somesuch, the good v. evil/online v. offline conflicts prove powerful in a gosh-that’s-almost-too-easy-to-dichotomize kind of way.

I keep talking about online and offline worlds merging in more and more obvious ways, and I couldn’t ask for a more primal example.

Just as Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths serves as the defining narrative of the hypertext movement, this event hereby becomes the chief contender for the official tale of The Web Outside.

(Thanks for the link, Jeremiah.)

Photo Credit: Daily Mail (UK)

[tags]The Web Outside, Flashmob, Facebook, The Garden of Forking Paths, Jeremiah Owyang, @jowyang, Millenium Square Garden, Leeds[/tags]