Abstract

This paper examines the origin and history of the Occupy Wall Street movement, paying particular attention to its roots in social media. The paper draws heavily upon contemporary news sources in order to qualitatively examine the movement as well as to describe its aesthetic and functional character. Additionally the paper will utilize the existing literatures of philosophers and social scientists, most notably Michel Foucault, to examine the ramifications of social media on the outcome of democratic social movements. Finally, a composite historical-theoretical approach will render a predictive conclusion regarding the future of Occupy Wall Street as it sheds the characteristics of simple protest to become a social movement.

Introduction

It is the paper upon which the pamphlet is printed, the television that displays the news. It is the telephone call to the Senator and the petition for referendum, empty in of itself but a potential container nevertheless. The 2008 presidential election saw more than 20 percent of voters voicing their opinions through social media, reinforcing the certainty that no space is free of the politic. What The Economist calls “the world’s first genuine social-media uprising,” the Occupy Wall Street movement shows that discourse on governance is not limited to conventional spaces. This paper will examine the Occupy Wall Street movement as a case-study in the use of social media to commence political change, providing a detailed historical perspective of the movement as it spread from New York City to over 2000 cities worldwide. As a matter of history, the paper will focus on two primary questions:

1. What is the aesthetic character of the Occupy Wall Street movement?
2. How does the organization of the Occupy Wall Street movement correspond with its usage of social media?

Additionally, this case-study will include the benefit of a comparative perspective, drawing information from an array of political commentators, social scientists and philosophers whose timeless views provide valuable insight into the nature of these contemporary movements. Their supporting literatures will punctuate this text for the sake of grounding it as a work of value, standing on their shoulders so to speak.

Figures

Figure 1 Source: Trendistic

Figure 2 Source: Google Trends

Figure 3 Source: SocialFlow

Figure 4

Nature of Social Media

As a realm that is expanding faster than any other, the internet has become the likely forum for emerging discussions and conceptualizations of democracy. Deliberation, which used to require hours, days, weeks, months—or that may have been impossible altogether—now becomes commonplace as strangers unite in heterotopian spaces to collaborate on open source projects, discuss political issues, or chat about family life. The internet is newly invigorated with the life of social media, but it is necessary to dictate clearly that the internet and social media are not the same thing. The internet predates social media by decades and simply provides the infrastructure and anonymity necessary for the present conceptualization of social media to exist. As a house, the internet is the foundation upon which social media is built; unlike social media, everything about the internet is deliberate: protocols, architecture, and program compliance are all evidences of uniformity that is largely centralized in the hands of a few individuals—relative to the number of individuals that use the internet, at least. Social media, by contrast, couldn’t be more different from the rigid conformity of the first World Wide Web. It is instantly inclusive; whereas one can passively surf the internet, merely creating a Facebook profile adds to the millions of profiles that are already in existence. It is the emergence of a new internet, namely Web 2.0.

As a matter of clarity, it becomes necessary to define and categorize different forms of social media. Although these applications differ in substance and style, they share a single common trait that characterizes Web 2.0: user participation. From bloggers who write about everyday occurrences in LiveJournal accounts to photographers who upload digital photography to Flickr, ‘social media’ reflects an interactive internet that receives, stores, and distributes information between its users. As a matter of definition, this paper will use the term social media to include one or more of the following applications; however, this list is not all-inclusive, as innovative applications are developed daily that challenge the existing notion of participation in Web 2.0.

Social media’s primary emphasis is the transmission of information. Historically, political information was generated by experts and passed through established channels in a deliberate and unilateral manner.

“In the 1960s, “the tools of social protest were mimeograph machines and postage stamps.”

In contrast, social media is generated by its participants, circuitous and self-referencing. The social scientist Lasswell dissected political discourse, identifying five elements that draw notable differences between social media and other forms of communication. Social media challenges traditional modalities of information dissemination. It becomes apparent that the message may bear resemblances of a traditional message, but the actors themselves are masked. As the Lasswell model indicates, unlike traditional modes, it is common for anonymous information generators to correspond with anonymous recipients, while the expertise of either is unknown. Consider the following model:

Theoretical Comparisons

The political power of social media is evidenced best by a Foucaultian machination known as “the panopticon,” a structure ingeniously designed so that a single jailer can gaze upon a host of incarcerated individuals who are unaware of the warden’s attention; in essence, the warden may or may not actually be watching them, a subtlety that is unknown to the inmates. As many theorists and writers speculate, the jailer’s ability to discipline the inmates en masse is doubtful, as the jailer is infinitely outnumbered by the masses of inmates. However, without communication between themselves or the jailer, the incarcerated cannot know who has the jailer’s attention, nor can they organize themselves for revolt. Foucault describes it as:

“…the perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly. A central point would be both the source of light illuminating everything, and a locus of convergence for everything that must be known: a perfect eye that nothing would escape and a centre towards which all gazes would be turned.”

Foucault’s description of the panopticon is dichotomous against the modality of social media’s collaborative nature. Whereas the panopticon is the ultimate rendition of centralized government, social media is the ultimate form of decentralization as information passes between actors. Furthermore, social media turns the centralized notion of governance on its head, turning every actor into a warden. The central locus, once a machination of mirrors becomes a machination of glass as everyone peers inside, eager to take part in governance. Social media is thus defined as the antithesis of Foucault’s panopticon in a poststructuralist sense.

In the absence of any media, the five senses typically bring individuals into contact with the natural world which excites combinations of these senses: the visual aesthetic of a newspaper combined with its tactile roughness with the ambience of a coffee shop, or the visual stimulation of video combined with the urgency and theatrics of a nightly news broadcast. Social media, as a means of engaging the senses and conveying information bridges spatial gaps and brings the originator one step closer to his or her recipient. The very basis of the hashtag itself is in line with the occupiers themselves: leaderless and without organization, the movement is trapped within the reality of its New York City existence while the hashtag is trapped in a utopia of 140 characters of context. To this end, renowned philosopher Foucault speaks at length of spaces, explaining that there are endless numbers of spaces which correlate with endless purposes and degrees of abstraction. Real, tangible spaces exist, as do imaginary spaces—known as utopias. The spaces that concern this paper the most could be called “heterotopian spaces,” which have elements of real and utopian spaces. Whereas a beach on Maui may be the utopian vision of a future bride who daydreams of her Maui beach wedding, Maui is likely to be a real space to her wedding planner who resides and works full time on the island. When the bride visits Maui for the first time, her imaginary utopian spaces clash with the real spaces to create a heterotopia—a combination of the real and the imagined that formulate her perceptions of Maui, which will be “just as I imagined it,” something less, but hopefully more. This provocative notion of space is present in every form of communication: when a friend mentions how fantastic a film is (utopian space), and it isn’t (real space), the result is a heterotopian letdown somewhere near the middle of the movie. Social media creates heterotopias as users engage with one another by way of virtual spaces that have foundations in both reality and myth. It acts as a shuttle, transporting elements of real spaces through a timeless vehicle—the internet—that is ultimately heterotopian in its delivery of combinations pictures, sounds, and words that err as often in omission as inclusion. The notion of heterotopia can be found in each of the senses, with social media being one of the most efficient methods ever devised to disseminate and create heterotopias that are grounded as much in reality as myth.

Character of the Movement

There can be little doubt that Occupy Wall Street was not, and is not, an invention of a political vacuum. In fact, the movement’s roots are strongly footed in the Egyptian revolution and the governments’ subsequent overthrow. On July 13, 2011 the Canadian magazine Adbusters published a short message on its blog titled “#OCCUPYWALLSTREET: Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?” In 2010 the Arab Spring captured the eastern imagination as it swept across Egypt, Tunisia and sparked civil disobedience and unrest in Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen, among many other nations. What began as a few isolated incidents of civil disobedience in response to the perceived imbalances of political and economic powers became a full-fledged movement, ill-defined and passionate, intent on destroying existing power structures, both secular and religious.

The movements’ advocates and critics sat side-by-side and watched as events unfolded through the wonders of social media, which closed spatial distances and brought news generators closer to their audiences than many imagined possible. Despite hints of the emergence of new global political arenas within the realm of social media, it is arguable that the Arab spring’s social media revolution was a product of Arab technophile elites, gathering too few participants to be considered a byproduct of grass-roots social media. Regarding the influence of social media, The Economist writes,

“…less than 4% in Libya, 5.5% in Egypt, and a larger but hardly massive 17.5% in Tunisia—and it’s clear that while these media may have helped mobilise a core group, traditional word-of-mouth and al-Jazeera television played a much bigger role.”

The notable disparities between haves and have-nots among actors in the Arab-spring further define the uncertain future of social media if economic and social tools are not constructed to foster growth. Internet historian Howard Rheingold writes, “[social media applications] are early manifestations of social changes that could continue to bloom as more become literate in participatory media — or could fail to take root if those literacies are available only to elites.” Beginning in July of 2011 a sizeable dissident group, widely known as “occupiers,” balanced the scales of global unrest in a bid to change international systems for complex, albeit ill-defined reasons. The occupiers drew much of their early inspiration from successes in the Arab world. The actors, both eastern and western, were tied to the same general spirit of discontent and unrest; more importantly, their organizations marked the emergence of new trends in social organizing and made use of social media in a heretofore unseen fashion. As protests, marches, and strikes swept the eastern globe, speculations regarding the emergence of a western equivalent—an American spring, began to emerge.

The origin of the occupiers is inseparable from the indie magazine Adbusters, which is titled as such due to its ad-free layout that spurs the revenue model of traditional print media, that typically rely heavily on corporate sponsorship in the way of advertising to cover the costs of upkeep and overhead. This magazine’s unique model, in addition to its unique readership, is ideal as any for the Occupy Wall Street movement’s anti-corporationist movement to originate. The paper called upon its readership, “jammers everywhere,” to take part in massive anti-consumerism in an unprecedented scale. The message, capitalizing on the successes of political movements related to the Arab spring, called for its readership to “flood lower Manhattan” with food, water, clothing and shelter on September 17. Adbusters had been chronicling the Arab Spring for months and looked forward to its western counterpart; faced with the prospect of failure, or at least the unexciting banality of the late summer political environment in North America, the progressive magazine began laying plans for a movement of its own.

“Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a straightforward ultimatum – that Mubarak must go – over and over again until they won.”

In the first post, Adbusters created the hashtag #OCCUPYWALLSTREET, which is a code designed to enable social media search engines such as Twitter and Tumblr to locate and disseminate the adjoining post. Unlike traditional media—including elements of web 1.0 (the “old” internet, when content was primarily developed by webmasters), hashtags empower users at any level to define keywords as well as the relevant categorization of their content. These hashtags act as a collective journal, generated ad-hoc by any interested party, edited by no one, and disseminated by the social media engines. Hashtags are presented as part of a collective consciousness, brimming with information at times, yet part of a collective forgetfulness when hashtags go unused and fade into the subconscious of the internet. As Auer writes, “possible outcomes from uses of social media in public affairs range from the widely praised, e.g. a #Text Haiti humanitarian relief campaign, to inconsequential, e.g. posts on a political blog that no one consults…” Like many things on the internet, the Adbusters’ #OCCUPYWALLSTREET article was forgotten as soon as it was posted, receiving not a single mention from any notable sources for days.

The next reference to Adbuster’s Occupy Wall Street did not occur until July 20, when the twitter feed crawled across a blog created by a film producer from Costa Rica. The Brisbane Times used SocialFlow, an online marketing tool to archive the history of the #OCCUPYWALLSTREET hashtag as it began to grow. The Times writes:

“[the producer’s] post was retweeted once and then there was silence until two July 23 tweets – one from the Spanish user Gurzbo and one from a retired high school chemistry teacher in Long Island, New York, named Cindy tweeting as gemswinc. Gurzbo’s post was not passed along by anyone but Cindy’s was, by eight people, including a Delaware-based opponent of the Federal Reserve, a vegan information rights supporter, a Washington-based environmentalist and an Alabama-based progressive blogger. Again, there was relative silence for nearly two weeks, until LazyBookworm tweeted the Occupy hashtag again on August 5. That got seven retweets, largely from a crowd of organic food supporters and poets. The notion of Occupy Wall Street was out there but it was not gaining much attention – until, of course, it did, suddenly and with force.”

Despite originating in the Adbuster’s blog (which is semi-static website in its own right—considerably Web 1.0 with the exception of a single comment box) inclusion of the #OCCUPYWALLSTREET hashtag enabled the occupiers to build enormous momentum prior to the physical occupation—a factor that is unique to movements that utilize social media. Whereas community organizers who rely on traditional methods of propagating information may spend years carefully crafting a highly specific message with a specific course of action, Adbusters’ highly ambiguous post touched a nerve felt by many Americans who needed nothing more than a date, time and place to begin demonstrating their views.

Within days social media sites reported exponential growth which was quantified by tracing the number of hashtags and keywords stored up by social media search engines. Even in the absence of traditional forms of media such as television, radio, and newspapers, the movement began to take hold in the public conscious as users received and redistributed information as they saw fit.

“Social media experts trace the expansion to hyper-local tweeters, people who cover the pulse of communities at a level of detail not even local papers can match. In New York, credit goes to the Twitter account of Newyorkist, whose more than 11,000 tweets chronicle the city in block-by-block detail. His was one of the first well-followed accounts to mention the protests in mid-September. Trendistic, which tracks hashtag trends on Twitter, shows that OccupyWallStreet first showed up in any volume about 11pm on September 16, the evening before the occupation of lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park began. Within 24 hours, the tag represented nearly one of every 500 uses of a hashtag.”

As the movement grew, the nature by which it used social media evolved as well. Not only did the #OCCUPYWALLSTREET hashtag gain momentum, it reached critical mass and burst into numerous related protests, as indicated by the SocialFlow data render. Occupy Wall Street quickly became Occupy Oakland, Occupy Denver, and Occupy Salt Lake City, splintering into two thousand cities worldwide. The proliferation of information through social media ballooned as the movement took on a snowball effect, gaining mass and momentum as people talked about it, and people talking about it because of its mass and momentum. Social media became a correspondence tool, a grocery-shopping list, and a minute-by-minute update that informed its viewership worldwide. As the realities of occupation began to settle in, the novelty of social media wore off, as evidenced by a general decline in activity throughout the months of October and November.

Organization of the Movement

The New York City General Assembly became the governing body of Occupy Wall Street on August 9, adopting hyper-democratic methods for deliberation as it struggled to focus the efforts of protestors and their message. The group collaborated on a daily basis wherever space presented itself, audible by way of human microphone (others repeating the message of the speaker) with special emphasis and time given to potentially marginalized groups. The Occupy movement was careful as it went about laying the groundwork for its own means of governance, understanding that any sort of cooption by interest groups could spell disaster for the movement’s success if it intended to transcend the faults of Washington lobbyists and special interest groups. Although this governing body sufficed for the first few days of the protest, it quickly became clear that the General Assembly was incapable of meeting the needs of the protest as numbers continued to increase, and as solidarity in voice danced out of reach. The General Assembly placed a great deal of emphasis on collaborative governance and eventually came to agreement on a “spokes model,” which makes use of hyper-local collectives electing spokespersons to join larger collectives, which then elect spokespeople to do the same. The model was not unique to Occupy Wall Street and had been used in many democratic movements, such as the Zapatista, Women’s Movement, and Spanish Revolution. The new organization was known as the “Spokes Council.” Officially adopted on November 4, the model boasted a new degree of solidarity as a result of increased centralization, but was not without its critics:

“…a big disruption came in the form of Greek artist Georgia Sagri. “I think through the spokes council process, working groups become organizations and they become parties,” she said. The group reacted with general derision, even some jeering; Sagri was breaking process. Sagri who is one of the original people that attended General Assemblies over the summer [continues] “it shows a misunderstanding of what exactly we’re doing here. Occupy Wall Street is never, and will never be an organization.”

The factionalism created by the Spokes Council demonstrated growing pains that were evidenced by the introduction of government, regardless of inclusivity and transparency. As the protest entered November there were already rifts forming within the Occupy community that threatened to destroy its cohesion. The occupiers risked being defining as:

•  “…a left wing version of the Tea Party, albeit without the nous or the coherence, and without adequate clarity about its demands.
•  …a deeply anti-social barbarian horde seeking to stir up hatred, always at the edge of violent action, without purpose, and only seeking handouts from the public purse.”

It was the inevitable result of the marginalization that occurs in democratic processes for the sake of consolidating voice; the floundering protest still had no clear-cut objective, and no singular set of demands. Without consolidation the movement was anarchy, protesting for the sake of protesting, and with democracy came the risk of devolving into exactly what the Occupiers reviled: elitism, subordination and disempowerment. “The primary focus of social conversations has centered on the protesters themselves and arrests rather than specific issues on which the movement was founded.” These concerns persisted and would never completely disappear from the Spokes Council before Occupy Wall Street was shut down on November 18.

Conclusion

In order to understand the Occupy Wall Street movement, it must be broken down into its two spaces, referencing the Foucaultian discourse. On July 19 the movement was born in a utopian space, almost timeless with the exception of its projected birthdate of September 17. Adbusters could not have known the vast and sweeping impact it would have on the American conscious as it gained autonomy and became an entity of its own, subtly evolving with each user who perpetuated its growth. Prior to September 17 the movement was ambiguous enough to capture the imagination of all who noticed it: dialogue was occurring in utopian spaces that gave only the slightest hint that it may realize itself at some future time. Moreover, the utopian space was free of the logistical dilemmas of reality that confronted it as soon as the movement actualized. The movement is now a hetorotopia in many regards, with the duality of fact mixed with the exaggerations of fiction as occupiers interact with their real surroundings and virtual surroundings at the same time. The fervor of the Occupy Wall Street movement existed long before the occupiers took Zuccotti Park, as indicated by the trending data. However, in truth, the Occupy movement’s collective voice was empowered by the success of taking Zuccotti Park, but its strength remained in the realm of virtual spaces. Moving into Manhattan and taking real space was intentionally the bellicose actualization of that first plan–ill conceived and removed from the real hardships of long-term settlement. To restate the point, the power of the Occupiers is their abstractness in utopian spaces and their successes in real spaces. The occupiers’ best interest is that of the flash-mob—utilizing the power of virtual spaces to create impacts in real spaces, and then retreating when the time is right in execution of a digital strategy. Sidney Tarrow, a professor at Cornell Law School said of the movement, “people in the same encampments, and people in different encampments, are now in constant contact and can share experiences. They’ll build a community. That’s why occupation of space is important.” One might wonder if Tarrown had considered a Foucaultian notion of space.

Occupy Wall Street is undoubtedly a movement of a different sort, unlike other movements that one might consider comparing it with. Just as quickly as it came, the movement is already fading into recent history as an idea that was too soon for its time, or a concept that was destined never to be able to actualize anything deeper than its own existence. The reality of the occupiers is as frightening as it is grand, with concerns of crime, sickness and violence circulating through the camps. The occupiers’ widespread successes have afforded them the ability to become a long-term movement, but only if they are able to transcend the physical miring which is quickly becoming apparent.
As participants are encouraged to refine their perceptions of democracy and governance through real, utopian, and heterotopian spaces, the occupiers will find that they are redefining themselves as well. Formation of the self-mythos through social media dates back to the first participants of the internet, when its users learned to create online personas, carefully crafted and tailored to represent how the user wished to be perceived. These “residual self-images” manifested themselves through social media in a natural evolution of the social media, and inevitably spilled out into conjoined spaces. It seems suiting to conclude with a piece of culture that echoes the street theatrics of New York City during the fall of 2011. Without the percussive accompaniment of drums or the bustle of casual spectators the poetry may seem thin, but its message bears repeating nonetheless. Although the occupiers have laid the groundwork for a successful social movement, in the absence of a substantive strategy, or facing the equal perils of cooption, the #OCCUPYWALLSTREET hashtag will fall into disuse and a street performer will echo the words of T.S. Eliot, chiming:

“This is how the occupation ends,
This is how the occupation ends,
This is how the occupation ends,
Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

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