Live democracy and its tensions making sense of livestreaming in the 15M and Occupy (original) (raw)
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NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies, 2021
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Scholars and activists have hotly debated the relationship between social media and social movement activity during the current global cycle of protest. This article investigates media practices in the Occupy movement and develops the concept of social movement media cultures: the set of tools, skills, social practices and norms that movement participants deploy to create, circulate, curate and amplify movement media across all available platforms. The article posits three key areas of inquiry into social movement media cultures, and explores them through the lens of the Occupy movement: (1) What media platforms, tools and skills are used most widely by movement participants? (Practices); (2) What role do experienced practitioners play in movement media practices? (Expertise); and (3) In what ways does the movement media culture lean toward open or participatory, and in what ways toward closed or top–down? (Open/Closed). Insight into the media culture of the Occupy movement is based on mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, visual research and participation in Occupy Hackathons, as well as the Occupy Research General Demographic and Political Participation Survey, a database of approximately 1200 local Occupy sites, and a dataset of more than 13 million Occupy-related tweets. The findings will be of interest to both scholars and movement participants.
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New “Media Logic”: The Mediatisation of Protest Movements
Cammaerts et al. (2013) argue that media are important to social movements because “without (self-) mediation, insurrectionary performances and acts of resistance become meaningless” (11). They assert that social movements should organise staged events that lead to visibility in a mass mediated public sphere and ask how “media logic” can “shape, inform or constrain the way activist conceptualize and enact protests” (11). Recent social movements, however, suggest a greater emphasis upon collective, long-term actions supported by social media. For example, many in the popular press and academia have linked the emergence of the Green Wave in Iran (Afshari, 2009, Grossman, 2009), the Arab Spring (see Howard and Hussain, 2011) and the #Occupy movement to services such as Facebook and Twitter. Castells (2012), for example, says Occupy was “born digital” and that the Internet “allows a leaderless movement to survive, deliberate, coordinate and expand” (229). Others are less enthusiastic, critiquing social media for enabling “slacktivism” (cf. Barney, 2008, Morozov, 2011). These debates demonstrate that, despite changes, it is still valid to consider how a “media logic” influences the development of protest movements. Indeed, the Internet had a marked effect on even offline incarnations of the Occupy movement in particular. Its insistence on a leaderless structure, for example, mirrors the Internet’s perceived open and egalitarian form of participation, an idea rooted in the (mistaken) association of the Web with 1960s counterculture. Critiques of the movement demonstrate similar parallels. Dean (2008), for example, argues that openness of the Internet leads to “the multiplication of resistances and assertions so extensive that it hinders the formation of strong counterhegemonies” (102). The Occupy movement has been similarly criticised for multiple, ambiguous and ultimately unachievable demands (Castells, 2012: 187). Barney (2008) cautions that online exchange often “stands in for motivation, judgement and action” because communication is “culturally coded, in advance, as political, eliminating any motivation (or obligation) to take on heavier burdens of judgment and action” (101). Claims that the “process is the message” of the Occupy movement (Castells, 2012: 185) similarly suggest that discussing issues is just as “political” as achieving discrete goals. The purpose of this exploratory paper is to conceptualise this mediatisation (see Hepp et al., 2010) of protest movements through an historical, comparative approach that examines media logic and protest actions from two different events—the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 (in which mobile media played a key role) and the Occupy movement (engaged with social media)—in order to examine the ways in which the contemporary media logic influenced not only the media activities of these movements, but also their structure, development, expectations, and activities (both offline and online). In other words, did interactions with media inform, consciously or unconsciously, these movements? If so, what possibilities were enabled through this mediatisation, and which were foreclosed? It is hoped this discussion can be used as a framework for understanding the development of other social movements in a way that resists generalising assumptions
Documenting Protest and Police: Occupy Wall Street and the (R)evolution of Digital Mobile Video
Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network
The importance of mobile phone video technology was highlighted in September 2011, when the Occupy Wall Street movement transformed Zuccotti Park in New York into a public space for protest. For those not present, the occupation was witnessed and interpreted through the reporting of traditional media – local and global news organizations, the Internet, radio and printed media. Yet most vitally, Occupy Wall Street was characterized by a new form of representation captured through the camera phone lenses of localized practitioners experimenting and rapidly realizing, often in real time, the value of mobile phone cameras within the new media ecology of social activism. Perhaps nowhere are the implications of recent digital video technologies more influential than in the synthesis of activist movements, citizen journalism, documentary practices and emerging forms of new media, such as the live streaming application – Ustream. Analyzing the practices that matured during the Occupy moveme...