We are living in unprecedented times here in the United States of America. A revolution seems to be stirring across the country all fueled by the occupation of Wall Street. It all started when a small group of students decided to pitch tents on Wall Street in disgust to corporate greed and the 2oo8 collapse of the economy. The occupation went largely ignored by mainstream media for the first week, only to be picked up when large amounts arrests and alleged incidents of civil rights violations began leaking out. How can these protests gain so much national steam when corporate media largely ignore them? Quite simply, the Internet.
You may have seen this YouTube video floating around Facebook or your e-mail inbox in early September.
That is one thing you won’t see attributed in the media, it’s the group known as “Anonymous” that really can be credited with starting this groundswell. They used social media, chat rooms and simple e-mail to alert the public to their intent and encouraged others to join. Two weeks later and look where it’s at now.
Here is map showing Occupy Facebook groups and pages. The red dots represent pages and the green groups. The larger the dot, the more people follow that particular page/group.
Click to Enlarge
It will continue to spread even faster now that MSNBC, CNN, FoxNews and others have devoted large amounts of airtime to the movement. Facebook is the main method of organization with Twitter fueling the real-time information push across large occupation areas. Checking out the @OccupyWallSt page, I noticed many messages discussing rumors and information that was filtering through word of mouth.
The biggest challenge the movement will face is information overload. When everyone has a voice, it’s very… democratic. The noise factor will increase ten-fold and the chance for misinformation increases drastically. Those are the challenges, but I shouldn’t need to tell you the positives of giving everyone a voice in the crowd. You have to take the bad with the good. It remains to be seen if communication begins to get filtered to a central location at these occupations; my gut tells me this will not happen. Whomever is in control of the Facebook and Twitter presence of any occupation wields an enormous amount of influence and power.
This is what the modern day newsroom looks like. It’s no longer Versace suits and $10,000 workstations. It’s college students and other young people with their $500 laptops and a pot of coffee. What is truly amazing is that this strikes fear into Rupert Murdoch and other media millionaires. They no longer dictate what gets attention and what doesn’t. Less than 20 young people organized a national movement and forced the corporate media to pay attention, a bit of role reversal you could say. But that is what makes this movement so unique and never before seen in the United States.
Not until now have we seen young people organize and use their Internet savviness to do it. We’ve seen small-scale versions similar to this, but nothing on a national scale. The young people who fuel the activism and organization are digital natives. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube while all new this past decade is like second nature to these 20-somethings. If the barons on Wall Street need one more thing to keep them up at night, the generation currently in our K-12 system utilize the Internet better and are more savvy than us. These digitally driven revolutions will not be slowing anytime soon. The only threat to this in the long term is the government trying to regulate the Internet and wielding their control over the bits and bytes flowing freely from network-to-network.
Grab a magnifying glass (computer) and watch the revolution, you’ll only see bits and pieces on network television or your local newspaper. Download, stream, tune in and watch it unfold in real-time online. The place where it all started.
I know it has been awhile everyone! I have been super busy here at UW-Stout with classes and work. Here is a nice in-depth entry I prepared for UW-Stout administrators on the use of Facebook in their crisis management plan. Enjoy!
