Sunday, February 19, 2012
Occupy Movement
As I was reading the article by DeLuca and Peeples (2002) about the WTO protests in Seattle, I kept drawing comparisons to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Just like in Seattle, the protests on Wall Street and in cities across the country only started getting major media traction once the violence began to escalate between police and protesters, and generally only in those places where confrontations and arrests occurred like in Oakland. Even right here in Fort Wayne, the media has mostly dismissed the movement's goals and objectives and has instead focused on the tangential issue of Occupiers camping out in public parks in violation of park rules. As Harold (2004) points out in his article on cultural jamming and media activism, the media has a hard time ignoring a good "spectacle." It could be argued, as DeLuca and Peeples do in their article, that if it wasn't for the "spectacle" created by these confrontations between police and protesters, the story would likely have died a quicker death (Although Occupiers in Fort Wayne were moved out of Headwaters Park to a more visible location in Freimann Square, news coverage itself has practically disappeared). Like with the WTO protest stories, coverage of the Occupy protests invariably includes some discussion of why the Occupiers are there in the first place. The Occupy movement itself is born out of a frustration many Americans (the so-called 99%) have in feeling like don't have a say in, or even access to, the decision-making process of their government. Clearly, the Occupiers understand the important of visual discourse or "images" in a hypermediated world as they have staged their protests largely in public spaces where they could be visible to the masses and an irritant to corporate and municipal authorities. It's only because the Occupy movement has had moments of spectacle that the traditional media has bothered to pay attention. If it weren't for the episodes of violence and police brutality, the Occupy movement might have faded completely from view.
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Nice connection here, John. I will say that studying the Occupy Movement has a lot of potential for a final project in this class! Something to think about!
ReplyDeleteI think your discussion is well-thought out and ties the pieces together nicely with current events. In reading the DeLuca piece, it is hard not to drift off and start thinking about all the ways in which this argument applies today. There was a quote from Kracauer that really stood out to me. He is quoted as saying "Society does not stop The urge to live amid glamour and distraction, but encourages it wherever and however it can." in your example of the Occupy movement it is clear that the media is encouraging distraction. They do not want audiences to 'gaze' and contemplate what the activists are really doing, instead wild images are shown briefly and the next story begins. This theory can also work in the activists' favor. The idea of even breaking through all of the imagery and noise is encouraging. The public screen presents a medium where public opinion can be seen and heard versus being read. While the images may only show the negative, the images are being shown and they can play a role in shaping public opinion.
ReplyDelete- Do you think that the visual media has done a good job on distracting the public from the real issues of the Occupy Movement? I remember that what it first got started all the media focused on where the number of people in Wall Street, then the focus shifted to the violence occurring and finally to the clean-up that was done in Central Park by the occupiers. However, I don’t remember one story where an occupier was interviewed and asked a question about their actual beliefs, instead they were asked about the brutally they experienced.
Delete"There's no news like bad news." Yeesh. I really like your connection John, and when we go back and think about different protests, it's the strikingly violent visuals we remember best. But I can't help thinking about Quintilian here, especially in regards to purposefully using violent or shocking rhetoric in order to spread a message. Quintilian believed that a good rhetor was inherently a good man (the good man speaking well), but it seems like with the advent of mass media, his point is almost moot. With the ability to utilize and manipulate millions of people with a single speech, whether in a civil manner or in a disturbingly uncivil manner, it would seem that the propensity for manipulative power is almost too much for one rhetor to deal with as a moral being. Now that fighting police officers, standing naked in the street, or setting a flag on fire are powerful rhetorical actions that can be used in the public screen as the essential supplement to the public sphere, where does that leave us? The public screen gives us the rhetorical power of sensationalization. Is sensationalized fervor "good men speaking well"?
ReplyDeleteNot really. It seems to me that senationalized media falls under the broad heading of "Spectacle". The question may seem a little extreme, but could we be witnessing the slow death of ethos in media communication? At least on that large of a national level (Occupy, Battle in Seattle, the Presidential Campaigns...).
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