Media Culture in the Occupy Movement

Livenotes: http://bit.ly/rp12notes-or

Key Concepts

Media Ecology

Adbusters

Sept. 3rd: OWS planning session, Tompkins Sq Park

Sept. 10th: Anonymous Video Calls for Support

Anthony Bologna pepper sprays Chelsea Elliot, Jeanne Mansfield, and 3rd Woman, September 24th 2011

AnonyOps: Anonymous call to action, September 28th

700+ Arrests on Brooklyn Bridge, Sat. October 1st, 2011

Photo: David Shankbone

Mic Check!

Media Culture and the Occupy Movement

Sasha Costanza-Chock

Pablo Rey Mazon, Center for Civic Media: http://numeroteca.org/cat/frontpage-newspaper/

@schock | http://schock.cc

Media Culture Characteristics

Conclusions

Methods

Media Culture

Overview

Discuss!

Practices | Transparency | Experts | Amplification | Messaging | Spokespeople | Openness | (etc)

Tools, Skills, Practices, and Norms

Diversity of methods

Rapidly changing media ecology

Rich and complex media cultures

Both depth of experience + tactical innovation

Open & closed logics

Key Concepts

Media Ecology

Media Culture

Discussion

How can we best understand the complex relationships between social movements and the media ecology?

Media Practices

"Things that people do with the media" (Couldry, 2004)

Create

Transparency

Curate

What are the movement's mechanisms for internal and external transparency in decisionmaking?

• Security culture
• Tyranny of structurelessness
• Structural barriers
• Egos & 'Hard Core'

• GAs
• Open WGs
• Open notes
• Livestreaming GAs

Circulate

Media Ecology

Characterized by: 1. political economy of the media system; 2. technical affordances of available media platforms; 3. levels of ICT access and read/write/execute media literacies in the population; 4. legal and normative constraints on speech.

Experts

"Well, there’s no typical day. But I think if I had to summarize or kind of approximate what a typical day would be, I would say that around 9 a.m., my alarm goes off. I have some tea. I tweet a little bit. I check my email. I try to eat something. Then I usually meet up with the media team, either here on-site or at our off-site location; check in with people with the Livestream, with social media; check in with the PR team to see if they’ve got any press releases or things that they want me to help push online; and then come through the park; have lunch in the park and talk with people; interview people on Twitter—on the new occupier hashtag so that they get introduced to other occupiers online—and then usually in the afternoon we have working group meetings. For example, the media team will meet, or the Arts & Culture committee, or the Community Relations committee. Later on, we’ll have General Assembly in the evening at seven and I try to tweet those, too, or at least help coordinate who’s live-tweeting each General Assembly so that people can stay informed. Also helping the media team and tech people put up new forms of interactive technology for the General Assembly, like projection screens and online polling and text responses and all of these things we’re trying to build to make it more interactive. And then in the evening if I’m lucky, I’ll get a chance to relax a little bit with folks here at camp, or maybe go meet up with some folks, or speak at a forum or a workshop in other places to do outreach, like at local colleges or local events and just kind of get the word out about what we’re doing. And then usually in the late-night, I’m back here at Zuccotti and doing like late-night media round-up: looking at the news of the day, doing question-answer sessions on the Livestream—people like to do that—and yeah, one or two or three in the morning, or maybe I just stay the whole night, I usually head back to Brooklyn and try to get some sleep." [Justin Wedes, interviewed by Brooklyn Ink]

Mixed Methods, Open Research Network

*Great moment to care about movement media!*

Are there media and communication experts who work to produce and circulate movement messages? If so, what are the accountability mechanisms that link their messaging to participation from the movement base?

=)

Interviews | Participant Observation | Surveys | Network Analysis | Focus Groups | Textual Analysis | Biographies | + many more

Social Movement Media Culture

Amplification

The set of tools, skills, practices, and norms that social movement participants use to create, circulate, curate, and amplify movement media across platforms.

Are there mechanisms (formal or informal) by which voices from the movement base are amplified across platforms? What steps does the movement take to lift up the voices of participants who are in positions of structural disadvantage?

Formal mechanisms: POC WG, OTH

Procedural mods: Progressive Stack

Informal: Discussion, debate, dialogue

Transmedia Mobilization

Systematic dispersal of social movement narrative across multiple media platforms, creating a distributed and participatory movement ‘world,’ with multiple entry points for organizing, for the purpose of strengthening movement identity and outcomes.

Open, Distributed, Collaborative Approaches

ORGS Working Group:

* Christine Schweidler, Data Center

* Harisson Shultz, CUNY

* Hector Cordero-Guzman, CUNY

* Julia Sebastian, Data Center

* Mara Ortenburger, Data Center

* Saba Waheed, Data Center

* Sasha Costanza-Chock, MIT, Center for Civic Media, Occupy Research

* Stefania Milan, The Citizen Lab, Toronto

* Yvonne Yen Liu, ARC, Colorlines, Occupy Oakland

* Zeynep Tufekci, from UNC, and Berkman

* Sonya Rifkin, Data Center

* Martha Fuentes-Bautista, UMass Amherst

* UMass students (COMM397AB)

* David Gibson

* Patrick McCurdy

* Bobbywego

* jean-luce morlie (from belgium)

* mronayne74

* Carla Borsoi

* DSS

* DJJRJR

* Anonymous

* Tristan Lear, Occupy Toledoz

* JThomas, Austin TX

Social Movement Media Culture

Lenses for thinking re: social movement media

Games

Film

Free Software

Print

People's Mic

People's Mic, OWS, 2011

Megaphone + People's Mic,

WTO Jail Solidarity, Seattle, 1999

youtu.be/yBUZH2vCD_k?t=1h4m2s

Lifecourse

Media Ecologies

Media Teams & Working Groups

Broadcast

Design

Mobile

Music

Occupy London

Occupy Detroit

Occupy LA

World Social Forum, Brazil, 2009

OccupySpots

Occupy Boston

Photo: Martin Engelking

G8, Scotland, 2005

Occupy Wall St (NYC)

Photos: Neon Tommy

Photos: Neil Cummings

Occupy Vancouver

Occupy Toronto

http://www.loudsauce.com/occupyspots

Photo: David Shankbone

Photo: Steve E.

Photo: ClarA, https://docs.indymedia.org/Local/ImcUkG8Dispatch

Photo: Occupy Vancouver Media

Social Media

Infrastructure

Posters

Code

Live Streams

Faceted browsing (cdetar, hackathon 2): http://www.occupyresearch.net/2012/03/24/faceted-browsing-of-orgs-data/

http://web.media.mit.edu/~cfd/occupystreamsmap/

http://globalrevolution.tv/

The Uptake, RNC 2008

Wisconsin, March 2011

DREAM activists, 2010

Deep Dish TV, 1986

Occupydata Hackathon

Social Media

Messaging

Do movement norms encourage participants to speak for themselves, to speak but remain ‘on message,’ or not to speak at all?

New Facebook Occupy supporter page activity

Gilad Lotan, SocialFlow

#OccupyWallSt, July 23rd

#OccupyWallSt, October 13

Caren, Neal and Gaby, Sarah, Occupy Online: Facebook and the Spread of Occupy Wall Street (October 24, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1943168 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1943168

Standing

Tweets in the Spanish #15M movement

cdetar, occupy hashtag URL visualization: http://alltheurls.tirl.org/pixel/date/#all/1

Are there few, or many, movement spokespeople who represent the movement in the mass media? How concentrated is movement ‘standing’ in mass media?

“At first press didn’t know we existed, but now we are a regular fixture for them and when someone isn’t at the table for a moment they really freak out. They have become so reliant on us that they often don’t put in any effort themselves to walk around and speak with people but instead ask us for two nurses and a teacher or whatever they want.” - OWS Press WG member

amac, new occupy hashtag users over time

http://montera34.com/occupyresearch/author/amac/

14 Occupy @reply networks, by Ryanne Turenhout, Ruben Hazelaar, Thomas Boeschoten and Mirko Schäfer.

http://rlturenhout.net/2011/12/visualising-14-hashtag-networks-occupydata/

Open/Closed

In what ways does the movement media culture lean towards open (participatory), and in what ways does it lean towards closed (top-down)?