Occupy and Social Movement Communication

Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 21/02/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/RCAC_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415644044_text.3d 40 OCCUPY AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT COMMUNICATION Dorothy Kidd Introduction On 17 September 2011, several hundred people took over Zucotti Park near the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Over the following weeks, Occupy Wall Street expanded to a trans-local movement known simply as Occupy, in which tens of thousands took over public squares and streets and participated in allied off- and online actions, in 951 cities in 82 countries. Inspired by the uprisings in Egypt, Greece, Spain and Mexico, Occupy was far from spontaneous; it converged many singular struggles of students, artists, trade unionists, anti-poverty groups, media activists and hackers, which then in combination scaled up further than any other (Gamson and Sifry, 2013: 162). Adbusters, the Vancouver-based culture-jamming magazine, set the initial date on the anniversary of the signing of the American Constitution with one single demand, “a presidential commission to separate money from politics”. Nevertheless, the Occupy movement refused to make any specific claims of the US or other national governments. Instead, under the inclusive banner of the ‘99%’, they employed an extensive repertoire of participatory communications practices to call out the inequities of corporate and government policies which had impoverished millions through home foreclosures and rising debt. More significantly, they set about to build a social movement based on self-care and self-representation, community dialogue and collective deliberation. Many commentators from across the political spectrum have dismissed the Occupy movement because of its lack of long-term impact on Washington politics, or corporate power. The record in these realms is indeed spotty, as, aided by government bail-outs, finance capital has rebounded with renewed force and continues in its exalted place in government decision-making around the world. However, in this chapter I instead focus on Occupy’s contribution to participatory communications. I argue that Occupy’s programmatic goal was not to change state or corporate 457 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 21/02/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/RCAC_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415644044_text.3d OCCUPY AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT COMMUNICATION institutions, but was inward, to prefigure direct grassroots democracy through the cultivation of democratic communications. The movement garnered much higher levels of US commercial news coverage, much more of it positive, than earlier movements for political, economic and social justice (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012). More significantly, and with distinct local variations, Occupy “renovate[d] and democratized virtually all aspects of the communication process: the definition of communication, of what social actors may participate, the employment of new media technology, the democratization of existing technology, the redefinition of ‘media professionalism’, the development of new codes of ethics and new values” (White, 1995: 93). A short history of social movement communications Describing the historical role of oppositional movements within the dominant culture, Raymond Williams posited that each epoch consists of different variations and stages, and at every point there are dynamic, contradictory relationships in the interplay of dominant, residual and emergent forms (1977). Occupy’s repertoire of communications practices was not a pre-packaged set of software from a dominant research organization. Instead, we can see their DNA emergent in the historical cycles of residual social movements, three of which were oft-cited by Occupy participants, and which I briefly rehearse. The first was the student and new left movements of the 1960s. The US Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and other groups, advocated ‘participatory democracy’, where decisions were made by those affected by them (Polletta, 2013: 41). Much of the new left’s strategic repertoire was within the field of culture and communications. Angela Davis reminded us of this historical thread, when she spoke about the “long march through the institutions” before leading a street demonstration to Occupy Philadelphia on 28 October 2011. Drawn from Antonio Gramsci, and modified by the German student leader Rudi Dutschke, the strategy was for political movements to peacefully take control of “the switch-points of social power” in the field of cultural values. During the 1970s, one set of activists took up this call and founded alternative media organizations (variously called community media, radical media or grassroots media). Their goals were to challenge the hegemonic control of the means of communications, and prefigure the kinds of social values they sought by facilitating a plurality of expression, especially from groups systemically excluded from constituted power. During the 1980s, activists formed national, regional and transnational media networks, including community and social movement–based computer networks, long before the birth of the World Wide Web (Murphy, 2002). Nevertheless, this vision of nonhierarchical practice was constrained by the cost and accessibility of the means of media production and circulation, and as Atton notes, a small corps of paid and volunteer producers ran most alternative media (2002). The second historical moment, from which Occupy drew, was the Zapatista uprising against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 in Chiapas, Mexico. Protesting NAFTA’s policy of enclosing the ejidos, or the common lands guaranteed by the Mexican Revolution, they succeeded in holding off the Mexican 458 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 21/02/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/RCAC_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415644044_text.3d DOROTHY KIDD Army and gaining world attention, with a very short-lived show of arms, and a powerful war of “images, words, legitimation and moral authority” (Martinez-Torres, 2001: 348). The Zapatistas represented a paradox: high-tech information technologies, crucial to a globalizing capitalism, turned against it by a rural, and primarily indigenous, guerrilla movement. With few electronic or digital communications resources of their own, the Zapatistas drew instead on the network of alternative and social movement media dubbed the “electronic fabric of struggle” by Harry Cleaver (1995). The Zapatistas inspired civil society in Mexico, and a growing transnational anti-corporate globalization movement with their inclusive and more Gramscian war of position, which focused on strengthening participatory democracy, creative engagement in the cultural realm and intercultural dialogues through encuentros, or face-to-face public assemblies. The third historical moment took place in December 1999 in Seattle, Washington, when a coalition of coalitions opposed to neo-liberal globalization used their own means of information and communication to mobilize tens of thousands to disrupt the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Inspired by the Zapatistas’ model of horizontal direct action, and recognizing that there would be little positive US corporate news media coverage of the protests, alternative media producers, artists and radical software designers launched the Independent Media Center (IMC) (Kidd, 2003). The IMC represented a qualitative shift in the scope and scale of media power. The IMC do-it-ourselves ethos not only by-passed the gate-keepers of the corporate news media, but also the vertical approach of the established NGOs, whose spokespeople framed specific policy in terms friendly to the commercial news media, as well as the institutional approach of the established alternative media with their commitment to brick and mortar operations, permanent staff and relations with established community organizations. The IMC’s open-source platform was much more nimble: it allowed anyone with internet access to download and upload any genre of content, pre-dating blogging, YouTubing and Web 2.0 by several years. Very quickly, the global IMC grew to 150 autonomous media collectives around the world that functioned as the go-to medium for news reports for what began to be called the global justice movement. Nevertheless, the long-term viability of the IMC was limited by a lack of economic resources, and continuing tensions over the cultural capital of gender, race, class and rich country/poor country, all of which were harbingers of Occupy. Theorizing social movement communications In 1995, drawing primarily from the Latin American experience, Robert White argued that the kinds of social changes implied in the democratization of communication are best explained in terms of the process of social movements (92). After Seattle, there was an outburst of academic literature; however, much of it neglected the long, slow and south-to-north build-up of the global justice movement, and instead attributed the success in Seattle to the decentralized, flexible and distributed networks of the internet. For example, in one oft-cited article by Naomi Klein, she wrote that the activist model “mirrors the organic, decentralized, interlinked pathways of the Internet”. Less reported was her important caveat: “all this talk of radical decentralization 459 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 21/02/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/RCAC_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415644044_text.3d OCCUPY AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT COMMUNICATION conceals a very real hierarchy based on who owns, understands and controls the computer networks linking the activists to one another … a geek adhocracy” (2001). A decade later, the uprisings, beginning in Iran in 2009, and including Occupy in 2011, led to another uptick in commercial news reports and academic studies, this time most narrowly focused on young people’s use of Twitter, Facebook and other digital social media, neglecting the contribution of residual social movements and processes, and the continuing use of face-to-face and electronic communications, and of the dominant media. As Clemencia Rodríguez et al. have noted, the complex repertoires of social movement communications are thus reduced to the singular interface between individuals and the latest US corporate brands (Rodríguez, Ferron and Shamas, 2014). Fortunately, a growing interdisciplinary scholarship provides a more comprehensive, holistic and longitudinal approach. J. D. Downing explicitly designed the Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media to include historical and contemporary practices, from graffiti to the internet, and especially from movements of the global south (Downing, 2011: xxv). Cammaerts, Mattoni and McCurdy encompass the entirety of social movement media and communication processes and practices in what they term the media ecology (2013: 3), whose long history, Lievrouw suggests, involves “divides, diversities, networks, communities and literacies” (2011: 1–3). Treré examines activist media use as a diverse system of inter-related and inter-dependent parts and relationships, including keystone species, which co-evolve with a sense of locality (2011). These scholars use the theoretical lens of mediation to attribute a degree of agency to audiences, users, citizens and subordinate or marginalized groups (Cammaerts, Mattoni and McCurdy 2013: 4). It combines interpersonal processes of creation and sharing of meaning and the use of technological channels to extend, or enhance human communication (Lievrouw, 2011: 4). Mediation includes reconfiguration, in which users modify and adapt media technologies and systems as needed; and remediation, which consists of borrowing, adapting and remixing existing processes of communications and media making (4). All these authors recognise a major change in media power, or the direct control over the means of media production (Couldry and Curran, 2003: 4). The almost complete domination of media and information during the twentieth century by a handful of global corporations is no longer assured, their commercial success and business models not only contested by an array of capitalist rivals, but by social movement challengers. Since the mid-1990s, social movements have effectively directed their own media to mobilize communities of support and action, reach out to allies and broker space in the corporate commercial news media (Hunter et al., 2013). Some social movements take a transmedia mobilization approach, using a multitude of participatory media-making practices across multiple platforms, and producing multimodal narratives to reach and involve diverse audiences (Costanza-Chock, 2013: 97). Significantly, as we see below, they take advantage of the growing dissemination of read/write digital literacies, and the consequent emergence of mass self-communication networks in most regions of the world (Castells, 2007: 249), to create and share content, aggregate, curate, remix and circulate rich media texts among their social, cultural and political networks. The Occupy movement represented a complex of ecologies, which combined hundreds of autonomous local encampments, allied campaigns and off- and online 460 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 21/02/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/RCAC_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415644044_text.3d DOROTHY KIDD projects, linked by the Occupy name, values, communications repertoires and frames of meaning. Each local site varied depended on their local balance of social actors, existing histories of contention, social and communication divides and dominant media ecologies (Uitermark and Nicholls, 2012; Kidd, 2013), with InterOccupy developed to bridge the gap between the various groups by using online tools and conference calls (Donovan, 2013). Composition of Occupy The Occupy movement built on residual social movements and alternative communications groups such as Indymedia. For example, in New York City, the national Nurses’ Union, students’ organizations and artists groups, the Right to the City coalition, and the hacker group Anonymous had all organized protests in New York, and many became keystone members of Occupy. Many camps then actively reached out to existing community-based organizations to organize joint actions, educational forums and working groups. The Occupy Research Network (ORN), a collaboration formed by the Oaklandbased DataCenter.org, Indymedia activists and other scholar activists, reported that half the participants had been involved before in another social movement (CostanzaChock, 2012: 6). Their research report provides a more nuanced examination of the make-up of Occupy than is often reported. Large numbers of white, male, collegeeducated and Net-savvy young people were indeed involved (Costanza-Chock, 2012). However, at least half identified as working or lower middle class, with incomes at the median level of Americans, and with only a third employed full-time. There were slightly more women than men. Significant contingents of trade unionists, US military, working-class people and urban poor participated. The communications practices and platforms reported by participants complicate a simplistic image of white youth leashed to social media. The digital divides that shape and are in turn shaped by existing US class, race and gendered inequalities were also prominent in Occupy. The novelty for many was the opportunity for faceto-face public dialogue, disrupting the contemporary norm of social fragmentation and isolation. Although 64% reported using Facebook to gather information and 74% to post information, nearly half reported discussing Occupy face-to-face, a quarter used newspapers and 42% email. Overall, participants used a combination of “off-line, analog, poster and print-based and ‘low-tech’ forms of media production”, in parallel with high-tech “autonomous wireless networks, hackathons and the creation of new tools and platforms” (Costanza-Chock, 2012, 4–5). Residual movements and practices Occupy’s communicative innovation was not any particular technology or practice but its remediation and reconfiguration of earlier practices of residual social change movements. The rules of consensus for decision-making came from the feminist and anarchist traditions; the hand signals from the Disability Justice Movement 461 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 21/02/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/RCAC_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415644044_text.3d OCCUPY AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT COMMUNICATION (Costanza-Chock, 2012: 7); the human mic from anti-nuclear rallies and the global justice movement (Desiriis, 2013); the posters, street theatre, and street puppets from Reclaim the Streets (Rosenberg, 2012); the attention to daily care from the feminist movements (Haiven, 2011); and the story-telling from African American, Latin American and women’s movements. Each of these face-to-face practices was then remediated and circulated across the Occupy network via web-based conversations, YouTube videos or social media. Experienced media activists also helped out at many sites. For example, the Global Revolution stream provided DIY real-time coverage from sites around the world; initiated by activists with Los Indignados experience, it was supported by Indymedia and other long-time media activists. Other experienced hands helped set up working media, tech and press groups, which organized print publications, produced and circulated video narratives, designed and coded websites and wikis, built Occupy media platforms, liaised with alternative and commercial media outlets and supported social media presence (Costanza-Chock, 2012: 4). The commercial social media platforms were by no means universally embraced, as many were critical of the constraints of their corporate ownership, and instead set up their own local websites (Caren and Gaby, 2011). Horizontalism If the global justice movement had uneasily negotiated an alliance between the vertical and horizontal approaches to organization (Kavada, 2013), Occupy represented themselves as horizontals, with consensual participation “part of the myth of the movement, portending the kind of communication and the kind of reformed society they promise to bring into existence” (White, 1995: 105). The primary medium for deliberation and self-governance was the general assemblies, drawn from the Zapatista encuentros and convergences of the counter-globalization movement, with elaborate rules designed for “participation, consensus, consultation of membership, articulation of felt desires, [and] building solidarity” (White, 1995: 106). The human mic, in which participants repeated speakers’ statements en masse, allowed for greater participation as it enabled all voices to be heard in the same way, and reinforced everyone’s active engagement. The general assembly and the human mic became Occupy’s “most crucial identity symbols”, dramatizing to members that they are “part of the cultural capital” of the movement (106). The inclusiveness and attempts to unite the 99% were by no means realized. There were constant tensions over tactical differences, power fissures of race and gender, between ‘hard core’ and less frequent participants, and between professional class and those without permanent housing. Residual community-based organizations of working-class and poor people were inspired by the scope and scale of the uprisings, often provided material support and helped negotiate relations with city officials; however, they sometimes clashed over continuing stereotypes about poverty, race, class and gender, and especially over the camp-directed orientation and their own longer-term community-based approaches to policy and electoral reform (Williams, Poblet and Bee, 2011). 462 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 21/02/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/RCAC_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415644044_text.3d DOROTHY KIDD The tensions over the overarching narrative of horizontalism echoed debates in the new left of the 1960s. Jo Freeman had warned that the elimination of formal structures and establishment of horizontal ones does not automatically remove the power of dominant individuals and cliques, and this article was again cited to challenge the myths of “open-ness” (Costanza-Chock, 2012: 9) and horizontalism (Gerbaudo, 2012: 24). Gerbaudo argued against horizontalism full-stop, writing that that Occupy instead represented a “choreography of assembly” in which a smaller number of facilitators set the scene and scripted people’s physical assembly in public space (2012: 40). In contrast, for Costanza-Chock, Occupy represented a tension between “openings” for participation, and strong forces towards “closed cultures”. He characterized Occupy as a “leaderful” movement (2012: 9–10), especially cataloguing the leadership of working groups formed by women, people of color and LGBT people formed to support one another and each other’s participation. The commons in the square Occupy represented a renewed attention to local, public spaces and territories (Halvorsen, 2012: 5), providing unconventional intersections in which people come together to create new kinds of connections and solidarities (Atlas, 2012: 152). Many described this collective reclamation of public space and time away from waged work as a commons, in opposition to the enclosure or privatization and commercialization of downtown cores, in which any non-conforming people (and especially the poor) had been turfed out, and the possibilities of “alternative sociability” and political encounter reduced (Gerbaudo, 2012: 105). Occupy’s politics of the commons was not a call to reinvigorate public institutions of the welfare state but to create an alternative domain of collective production and social reproduction. Occupy provided the collective practice space for untold numbers of artists and cultural producers, and as Sylvia Federici has argued, placed the “creation of more cooperative and egalitarian forms of human, social and economic relationships at the center of political work” (Haiven, 2011). They prefiguratively set up working groups to attend to people’s daily needs, such as food, shelter, health and safety, and activities for kids; and to represent a diversity of collective imaginaries through arts and media projects. Story-telling and self-expression The encampments provided a glue of physical proximity, close working relationships and common obstacles and hardships, fostering “strong reciprocal trust and mutual support” (Marcuse, 2011). Rather than focusing outward, in reaction against state or corporate policies, or framing claims for ever-narrower constituencies that had become the trend for US NGOs, the focus was on group-generated needs. Occupy took “people out of their own silos, forcing more cooperation. A whole lot of cross-fertilization happened” (Rosenberg, 2012). Occupy provided multiple places of encounter, and a plastic sense of time, that facilitated rich dialogical exchanges and collective production of knowledge. Echoing 463 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 21/02/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/RCAC_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415644044_text.3d OCCUPY AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT COMMUNICATION the consciousness-raising of the women’s movement, and the Freirian notion of conscientisation, participants reflected on their life conditions and listened to one another, allowing for the articulation of private problems as collective and public issues (Sziarto and Leitner, 2010: 383). The mutual emotions that were unleashed created a “space for new identifications to emerge” (Sziarto and Leitner, 2010: 384), and allowed participants to recognize some of the deep social, economic and cultural divisions among them, and understand their relationship with other participants. Story-telling was one of the primary modes of expression, used in interpersonal conversations, protest rallies and social media dialogues. Unlike formal deliberative genres, story-telling allows speakers to provide a richer lived account of their own experience, to articulate situations, issues and values usually marginalized by the dominant culture (Polletta and Lee, 2006). A more open, less structured genre, storytelling encourages listeners to reconsider established ideas, stereotypes and social remedies, and to share their own narrative. Occupy participants used every form of artistic medium, from posters to music, ballet and flash-mob dance, street theatre, stand-up comedy and film. Sometimes art was employed tactically: singing en masse to stop foreclosure auctions, dancing flashmob style to take over bank lobbies, or using masks to maintain anonymity in face of security cameras and police surveillance. Drawing from the carnival traditions of street protest, they combined the element of surprise with the critique of the status quo through role reversal, subversive humour, and full-bodied mass participation. On other occasions, the art practices were part of strategic interventions with existing organizations or neighbourhood groups that highlighted structural problems of unemployment and precarity, or celebrated and memorialised existing neighbourhoods (Atlas, 2012; Treibitz, 2012). Occupy and the news ecology The Occupy movement changed the news ecology. Rather than focusing on mediafriendly protests and sound bites, participants documented protests, reported on individuals’ stories and provided the analyses themselves. They by-passed the residual commercial media gate-keepers by circulating their news on a number of different media platforms. Teams produced regular reports for news sites such as New York’s ‘Occupy Wall Street Journal’, and the live ‘Global Revolution’ video stream, and thousands of individuals created YouTube video reports. Over 170,000 people in the US alone shared live reports, news about police arrests and personal stories over 400 pages of Facebook. Hundreds wrote blog posts such as ‘We are the 99 percent’ on Tumblr, or posted news stories to an Occupy Reddit site. The total views of all these postings were in the millions. Independent and alternative media organizations, with platforms in print, radio and television, then re-assembled the reports and stories for audiences off the web. Nevertheless, Occupy depended on the mainstream news media to get the attention of the wider public and policy-makers, especially in the first week of Occupy Wall Street. In fact, it took a photograph of a police commander pepper-spraying a trio of young blonde women during a street demonstration before the dominant news 464 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 21/02/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/RCAC_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415644044_text.3d DOROTHY KIDD media provided much coverage. The resultant mainstream news coverage and the viral circulation of the video of the women screaming in pain led to a rapid expansion of Occupy encampments around the world. The Occupy movements’ circulation of that image set the pace; after that, the commercial news media often struggled to keep up with the movement’s news flow. Occupy not only garnered much higher levels of US dominant news coverage, much more of it positive, than earlier movements for political, economic and social justice (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012). The dominant news frame changed, re-introducing long-silenced debates about class and systemic inequality (Stelter, 2011), and renewed visibility to social movements, and their capacity for “upending governments and conventional wisdom”, as Time magazine put it (Stengel, 2011). The coverage reversed a long downturn in which few news reports featured the role of community organizations in remedying local problems and injustices (Barker-Plummer and Kidd, 2009). To be sure, the dominant genre of local commercial news continued; many of the stories featured incidents of violence. However, the strength of the #Occupy news flow meant that alternative narratives were “established in the public imagination”, according to Oakland media activist Tracy Rosenberg: “Injustice, inequality, homelessness is not invisible and can’t be swept away. The police can attack with flash grenades but we all have to see that. That makes a difference” (2012). Post-Occupy The Occupy movement involved more people, worldwide, than any public mobilizations since the global protests against the US and their allies’ invasion of Iraq, and represented a new cycle of social movement media power, renovating and democratizing virtually all aspects of communication. Occupy represented a perfect storm which cannot be easily replicated. Its impact was due to many factors – the element of surprise, the beginnings in New York, one of the globe’s primary media hubs, the multiple spaces and extended times of encounter outside normal capitalist relations, the contribution of residual movements and activists, the harnessing of a wide diversity of cultural and communications practices and the openness of its platform for others to engage. Nevertheless, there are some lessons we can take away about social movement communications. The movement modelled a transmedia approach, combining a fluid mix of practices that considered different cultures, literacies and strengths; social media were in fact mundane, everyday tools (Nielsen, 2013). The Occupy movement did not succeed because of its adaptation of computer applications, nor a particular horizontal or networked social formation. Rather than a flat architecture, the movement was constitutively ridden with imbalances and assymetries (Bergaudo, 2012: 19), troubling the “easy distinction between vertical and horizontal organizational structures” and showing more hybridized forms (Berger, Funke and Wolfson, 2011: 189). Creating a temporary spatial and temporal zone allowed the Occupy movement to develop a new “social ethic of democratic communication” (White, 1995: 112) that has been remediated in both old and new community-based political and cultural initiatives (Khatib, Killjoy and McGuire, 2012), and new social movement campaigns of 465 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 21/02/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/RCAC_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415644044_text.3d OCCUPY AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT COMMUNICATION immigrants, students, low-wage workers. During the heady days of the movement, Occupy participants did not wait for the commercial news media to tell their story; since then, they are not waiting for scholarly consideration, but are recording their own histories and analyses of the movement (Williams, Poblet and Bee, 2011; Writers for the 99%, 2012; Shiffman et al., 2012). Further reading Chapter 6, “Occupy Wall Street: Harvesting the salt of the earth,” in Manuel Castells’s Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (2012), examines the demographic components, ideas and values and communications repertoires of the Occupy movement in the US. Chapter 4, “‘The hashtag which did (not) start a revolution’: The laborious adding up to the 99%”, of Paolo Gerbaudo’s Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism provides a detailed account of the cultural mediation of face-to-face communications, and social media at Occupy Wall Street in New York City. The “New political spaces” edition of Race, Poverty and the Environment (http://reimaginerpe.org/node/6924) provides a deeper before-and-after examination of social movements at one site, Occupy Oakland. Readers interested in a historical and global mapping of Occupy should read the special Occupy issue of Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 11(3–4), 2012, which provides case studies of related movements (Los Indignados, Arab Spring, Chilean student movement, Israel), uneasy relationships to residual movements (North American indigenous movements, homeless peoples), specific Occupy encampments (Pittsburgh, London, El Paso, Los Angeles and Amsterdam) and theoretical discussions of its legacy. References Atlas, C. (2012) “Radical imagination.” In R. Shiffman et al. (eds.) Beyond Zucotti Park: Freedom of Assembly and the Occupation of Public Space. Oakland, CA: New Village Press (pp. 146–55). Atton, C. (2002) Alternative Media. London: Sage. Barker-Plummer, B. and Kidd, D. (2009) “Closings and openings: Media restructuring and the public sphere.” In K. Howley (ed.) The Community Media Reader. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Books (pp. 318–27). Bennett, W. L. and Segerberg, A. (2012) “The logic of connective action.” Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 739–68. Bergaudo, P. (2012) Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London: Pluto Press. Berger, D., Funke, P. and Wolfson, T. (2011) “Communications networks, movements and the neoliberal city: The Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia.” Transforming Anthropology, 19(2), 187–201. Cammaerts, B., Mattoni, A. and McCurdy, P. (eds.) (2013) Mediation and Protest Movements. Bristol: Intellect Books. Caren, N. and Gaby, S. (2011) Occupy Online: Facebook and the Spread of Occupy Wall Street, 24 October. 466 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 21/02/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/RCAC_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415644044_text.3d DOROTHY KIDD Castells, M. (2007) Communication, Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society. 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