(Roughly) Daily

Over 27 million YouTube viewers have watched Saatchi & Saatchi’s “T-Mobile Dance,” a (supposed) flash mob that comes together at London’s Liverpool Station in terpsichorean tribute to the wireless carrier– and winner of “Commercial of the Year” at 2010’s  British Television Advertising Awards.

Rival agency M&C Saatchi took the same concept and used it in Beirut…

It’s no more a genuinely-spontaneous gathering than the British “mob” on which it riffs.  But this testament to social media, shot (earlier this month,on March 5th) in a Middle Eastern airport in promotional service of international travel and commerce (Duty Free), coexists with the regional reality of spontaneous social and political unrest– unrest that actually has been abetted by social media, unrest that actually has the emergent character of flash mobs…

The ironies abound.

[via VSL]

As we monitor our Twitter feeds more closely, we might celebrate another example of “art-in-the-service-of-commerce imitating life– only more so”:  on this date (April Fool’s Day) in 1963 that the ABC television network aired the premiere episode of General Hospital, the daytime drama that became the network’s (and television’s) most enduring soap opera– and the longest-running serial program produced in Hollywood.  (The world’s longest-running soap opera currently airing on television is the British series Coronation Street, on air since December 9, 1960.)

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