Columbia offers ‘Occupy 101’ - m.NYPOST.com. Does getting pepper-sprayed count as extra credit? Columbia University is offering a new course on Occupy Wall Street next semester — sending upperclassmen and grad students into the field for full course credit. The class is taught by Dr. Hannah Appel, who boasts about her nights camped out in Zuccotti Park. As many as 30 students will be expected to get involved in ongoing OWS projects outside the classroom, the syllabus says. The class will be in the anthropology department and called “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement.” On her blog, Appel defends OWS, arguing that “it is important to push back against the rhetoric of ‘disorganization’ or ‘a movement without a message’ coming from left, right and center.” Addressing the safety risks of fieldwork among protesters, she writes on the syllabus, “I can say with absolute certainty that there is no foreseeable risk in teaching this as a field-base class.” Image as interest: How the Pepper Spray Cop could change the trajectory of Occupy Wall Street.
In his Times column this morning, David Carr wonders about the future of the Occupy Wall Street movement and, specifically, its fate as an ongoing topic of mass-media conversation. “Occupy Wall Street left many all revved up with no place to go,” he writes. Which is a problem, traditional-press-coverage wise, because: “In addition to the 5 W’s — who, what, when, where and why — the media are obsessed with a sixth: what’s next? Occupy Wall Street, for all its appeal as a story, is very hard to roll forward.” That could be true (though “very hard,” of course, is quite different from “impossible”). And it could also be true that the features that may give Occupy, potentially, enduring power as a movement — its malleability, its permissiveness, its ability to act as an interface as well as an event — might also be the forces that, day to day, challenge its ability to convene attention. Particularly at the level of the mass culture.
But that may well have just changed. Exactly. Social Media's Role In Social Change. NEW YORK -- A panel on social innovation and social change started with a joke. A panelist said they should go the full hour without saying the word "Twitter. " But Twitter, along with Facebook, were unavoidable terms that came up repeatedly in the discussion Thursday at an Advertising Week event at 300 Madison Avenue in New York City. The talk started with the Egypt revolution and inevitably turned to Occupy Wall Street, an ongoing event just a few miles away in Lower Manhattan. More than 450,000 Facebook users have joined Occupy Wall Street pages to date (scroll down for graph); Twitter chatter has surged.
"These tools are actually not that complicated," Change.org founder Ben Rattray said, downplaying the "innovation" part of the technology. Rattray added that social media is used for "supporting, not supplanting, existing strategies," though at the same time it can absolutely "spark something that wouldn't exist," he said. Ultimately, content is the killer app, Rattray said. From a single hashtag, a protest circled the world. Occupy the URL Takes Protests to The Internet. The Occupy Wall Street protests have spread to cities across the world. Now they're also spreading to banks' websites. A program called Occupy the URL, launched Tuesday, will turn any website into a protest, complete with pop-up photos of Occupy Wall Street protesters.
Users need only insert the URL they wish to occupy. The program doesn't actually change a website it targets, but rather creates a mashup of the page and protester images under a new URL. But the new site is more than just a collage over a screenshot of the targeted website: links from the original page remain live in the new URL. "We just wanted to provide a way for people anywhere online to show their support," says Jim Pugh, who created Occupy the URL. "I think there are different sites out there that people would be interested in occupying: Wells Fargo, Bank of America. " Pugh is the CTO of Rebuild the Dream, an organization launched in June with similar (and similarly vague) goals to Occupy Wall Street.
Occupy the Web. OWS Newspaper Raises $54,000 on Kickstarter. There's a new newspaper on Wall Street, and it's targeting a very different demographic than the classic publication. The Occupied Wall Street Journal, a newspaper dedicated to the Occupy Wall Street protests that began on Sept. 17, distributed its first issue on Saturday. Backers on crowdfunding site Kickstarter have picked up the printing bill for 50,000 copies and have already chipped in enough money for a second issue. The New York Times says that at the time of its first issue, the paper had raised more than its goal of $12,000 using the site. At this point, that number is close to $54,000.
"PLEASE KEEP CONTRIBUTING! We don't have billions like FOX News nor are we bankrolled by the Koch brothers," reads an update to the paper's Kickstarter page. "We only have YOU! Resulting pledges have put The Occupied Wall Street Journal in ranks with Kickstarter's most funded projects in the writing and publishing category. Image courtesy of Flickr Commons, Nick Gulotta Photos: Occupy Wall Street. OWS Protests Sprout 928 Offshoots On Meetup.com Overnight. Occupy Wall Street, which began with a couple hundred protesters in Manhattan's financial district Sept. 17, has sprouted "Occupy Seattle," "Occupy San Francisco" and several other solidarity events in more than 200 cities across the U.S.
The independent events, some simply community discussions, have been loosely tracked with Facebook, Google maps and links lists. Now, group meeting platform Meetup.com is assisting the protesters in their grassroots efforts. "We were contacted by the good people at Meetup.com, who got in touch because they heard we were in need of some technical assistance and advice," says a blog post on Occupy Together, a site linked by Occupy Wall Street websites and protest publication The Occupied Wall Street Journal's Kickstarter page. "Little did we know we’d go from listing 4-5 locations in one night to receiving hundreds of emails in a day. We were slowing the flow of information because us volunteers weren’t able to keep up. " OWS Tumblr Blog Lets People Share Their Stories. Ever since the movement first started to take off back in late August and September, protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement have been using social media to organize, recruit and communicate their vague yet very angry opinions.
A Tumblr blog entitled We Are the 99 Percent was launched on August 23rd, 2011 and has since become an effective medium for supporters who want their own voices to be heard. The concept of the Tumblr blog is pretty simple. Submitters must take a picture of themselves holding up a handwritten sheet of paper describing their own story. Most submissions read: "I am the 99%," at the very end of their description. The controversial Tumblr blog has received notable mentions from a number of media sources and the blog now receives almost 100 submissions a day.
I started following this Tumblr blog a few weeks ago and it has easily taken over my Tumblr dashboard. Haven't seen it yet? Have a Tumblr blog? We Are the 99 Percent. 14th October 2013 Question with 172 notes Anonymous asked: How can you claim to speak for 99% of people? We don’t claim to speak for anyone, we merely present stories. 14th October 2013 Photo with 186 notes I am 23 years old I am a female (not that it should make a difference, but apparently in our society it does…) From the day I moved out of my parent’s house, I’ve supported myself 100%, not because they don’t love me but because they can’t support my dreams financially.
For over two years I schlepped 2-for-1’s and shots to pay for my rent, a used car, and tuition at a community college. Now I’m attending the University of MN and I depleted all of my savings just so I wouldn’t have to take out a loan this semester. I’m majoring in journalism, a profession I consider a civic duty. I am the 99%. occupywallst.org 14th October 2013 Question with 12 notes Anonymous asked: We are the 99 percent- Why don't we RECALL these extremist NUTS that are in Washington, DC.??!!!!
9th September 2013 Thank you! Parsing the Data and Ideology of the We Are 99% Tumblr. One of the most fascinating things to come out of the current We Are 99%/Occupy Wall Street protests is the We Are 99% Tumblr. At the site, people hold up signs that explain their current circumstances, and it tells the story of a whole range of Americans struggling in the Lesser Depression. It is highly recommended. The site features pictures of individuals holding their signs, and occasionally the tumblr reproduces the text of the signs themselves underneath the image as html text.
Sometimes the text under the image is blank, sometimes it is a different message, but often it is the sign itself. In order to get a slightly better empirical handle on this important tumblr, I created a script designed to read all of the pages and parse out the html text on the site. It doesn’t read the images (can anyone in the audience automate calls to an OCR?) It’s a fun exercise, pointing out things I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
What were the most frequent words? Like this: Like Loading... Occupy Together.