Beneath the faux Egyptian columns of the Muvico 24 multiplex at Arundel Mills mall, a handful of strangers edges toward each other, like secret agents at a blind meet. Which is sort of what they are, dispatched here to perform a task they neither initiate nor understand, and then move on. They call themselves flash-mobbers, and everywhere I traveled this summer, the news was catching up with this faddish expression of the latest technology. Someone goes online and tells folks to meet at a public place and do something to attract attention -- burst into applause at a Manhattan hotel, spin in circles in downtown San Francisco, remove shoes and hop around as if on hot coals at Georgetown Harbor -- and then disperse. And then the cool thing is to refuse comment on what you've done -- to make a public statement and leave the understanding to others. The attempt at suburban flash-mobbing the other day was a flop. The organizer had instructed participants to gather near the entrance to the theaters, loudly hum the theme from "All in the Family," then stop and utter this cryptic phrase: "And you could do what you want then." To their credit, Steve, Dave and a guy who wouldn't give his name were prepared to do the thing. But only two other guys showed up, and it wasn't clear that they were part of the mob. Five minutes after the appointed time, everyone drifted off into the mall. Still, it's the thought that counts. The same folks who told us that the Internet would spawn a new era of peace, love and a thousand flowers blooming are now selling the notion that computers and portable communications gadgets will create new heights of human cooperation. More likely, new machines mean new ways to goof off. There is nothing revolutionary about flash mobs. When pagers were all the rage in the early 1980s, I watched young people filled with a sense of discovery summon each other to equally odd gatherings. Outside a movie theater in a Miami suburb, more than 200 young folks jumped with excitement over what they'd wrought with their nifty new pagers. To denigrate such gatherings as purposeless is wrong. New technologies tend to drive us apart, further atomizing our already solitary existence. But the yearning for community is deep and eternal, and so when people realized that their pagers could be a modern-day Paul Revere, calling friends and strangers alike to a suburban square, that was cause for celebration, not cynicism. Web sites that push flash-mobbing categorize the gatherings as mere "fun," but they are more than just an expression of the American Cleverness Industry. They are potentially an artistic or political expression -- just like their true parent. The roots of the flash mob go back 47 years, to a small, isolated building in the swamps of northern New Jersey. There, alone at the transmitter site of New York radio station WOR, master storyteller Jean Shepherd spun tales all through the night. He was a jazzman of the spoken word, a wise, gentle-sounding Midwesterner transplanted to the great metropolis to persuade the sad sacks of the working world that they were not alone, that locked inside their memories of golden childhoods were the keys to coping with the anonymity and idiocy of the rat race. Shepherd's stories captivated and liberated, but he and his listeners wanted more, something physical. So Shepherd ordered his minions to their apartment windows after midnight, and in unison they shouted, "Excelsior!" And they knew: They were not alone. But that was not enough. One summer night in 1956, at Shepherd's direction, for no special purpose, his listeners gathered. He called it The Milling. He issued instructions about when and where, and they came in the hundreds to a Manhattan street corner, and, as he told them to, they milled. The police came and asked questions, and, as Shepherd had instructed them, the millers declined, politely, to respond. And then they went home. A newspaper report said there had been a gathering of "people who apparently are out of step with the whole order of things." A statement had been made. It wasn't clear what it was, but it was out there. And now it is again, with a flashier name for faster times. But it's still a milling, a disturbing and welcome break in the natural order.