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http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...-media-flurry/
After a Spontaneous Snowball Fight, a Social Media Flurry
A photo of Times Square on Saturday night has reached readers around the world.
By EMILY S. RUEB
December 21, 2009
On a night when holiday parties were in full swing, Saturday night’s snowstorm kept many inside. Yet that night, something unusual, or maybe totally expected, happened: Snowball fights broke out across cities swirling inside life-size snow globes.
Twitterers sent out the bat signal for friends to gather at U and 14th Streets NW in Washington. But even amid the jovial atmosphere, a disgruntled detective stepped out of his Hummer and pulled a gun on the snow revelers after his car was pelted with white balls. The crowd erupted into a chorus, “Don’t bring a gun to a snowball fight!”
Was this the world’s first Twitter-organized snowball fight? Other calls were posted on Craigslist, Facebook and Twitter, yet at the heart of this digital city, at least one happened the old-fashioned way.
In Times Square, much of it now closed to car traffic to encourage pedestrian traffic, a group of adults stopped to scoop up and carefully mold snow into crumbling projectiles to hurl at strangers.
James Sims, a blogger and editor for BroadwayWorld.com, was on his way from a 42nd Street movie theater to meet his girlfriend, who was seeing “Mamma Mia!” a few blocks north at about 10:30 p.m. on Saturday. As he neared Father Francis D. Duffy Monument and Duffy Square, he saw two opposing lines of people stand as if about to start a game of “Red Rover,” he said. Shortly after, arcing white comets with powdery dust tails filled the space between the two lines.
Mr. Sims had been conserving his cellphone’s battery. Now he powered up and, while trying to shield his device from the driving snow, he posted what he described as a “pretty poorly framed and blurry” image to Twitpic before powering down to save energy. (See image above.)
By that point, the crowd had erupted and the once smooth ground was cratered with footprints and spent projectiles.
Mr. Sims said many in the crowd were tourists who had set down their shopping bags to join in. One police officer stepped into the firing range to curtail the event, but the crowd’s chorus of boos sent him on his way.
“I’m quite happy that the cop here had a sense of humor,” Mr. Sims said, referring to the episode in Washington.
These days, many spontaneous-seeming events are driven by social media, but it was only as the snow dust was settling that the social media engine started up.
Bill Wasik, the creator of the flashmob and the author of “And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture,” likens this to a “food fight scenario,” where all it takes is a cafeteria full of rowdy teenagers with loaded trays, brown paper bags and a human instinct for battle. But, he said, even if events like this one are not being started by social media, they are still being mediated by technology and tools.
When Mr. Sims turned his phone back on several hours later, thousands of people had retweeted his photo, and by morning, it had ended up on Boing Boing, a Web site run by editors who trawl the Internet for unusual stories. Mr. Sims’s photo caused a flurry of retweets and subsequent follower requests.
Doug Kim, a documentary photographer who stumbled upon the scene about 11:30 a.m., posted a series of images to his blog, which has received 19,000 views since 12 a.m. Monday and 68,000 views on CNN’s post about his photos. And out-of-towners in warm climates are leaving streams of comments, thanking him for the winter images.
“I wish I had known that a snowball fight would be a great marketing strategy,” he joked.
And now, there is a Facebook group to commemorate “The Times Square Snowball Fight of 2009,” which was created by four students who claim they started the fight.
Asked why his grainy photo of the moment was so popular, Mr. Sims responded, “The setting was so out of the ordinary.”