Foreign Affairs: convenience of social media tools in 'real democracy' of OWS. Occupy Online: Facebook and the Spread of Occupy Wall Street by Neal Caren, Sarah Gaby. Neal Caren University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill - Department of Sociology Sarah Gaby University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill - Department of SociologyOctober 24, 2011 Abstract: Since Occupy Wall Street began in New York City on September 17th, the movement has spread offline to hundreds of locations around the globe. Based on data acquired from Facebook, we find that Occupy groups have recruited over 170,000 active Facebook users and more than 1.4 million “likes” in support of Occupations.
Number of Pages in PDF File: 20 Keywords: Occupy Wall Street, Social Networks, Social Movements working papers series Suggested Citation. Journal article: Social Media, the Mobile Web and Augmented Revolution. Time Magazine: person of the year - The Protester. Working paper: Social Media & Revolution-Arab Spring & Occupy (information studies) Journal article: social media & (mass aggregation in) public space. Journal article: impact of social media on English riots 2011 (introducing idea of 'mediated crowd') Purpose – This article aims to explore the impact of new social media on the 2011 English riots.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper suggests that discourse on the riots in the news and popular press is obscured by speculation and political rhetoric about the role of social media in catalysing the unrest that overlooks the role of individual agency and misrepresents the emotional dimensions of such forms of collective action. Findings – In considering the riots to be symptomatic of criminality and austerity, commentators have tended to revive nineteenth- and twentieth-century crowd theories to make sense of the unrest, which are unable to account for the effect of new social media on this nascent twenty-first century phenomenon. Originality/value – The paper proposes that this original approach provides insight into the particular conditions in which the 2011 English riots emerged, while advancing crowd theory in general.