4
3
3
And it isn't just the received message that people are becoming dubious of -- they are also questioning the messenger. OWS is about financial malfeasance and income inequity, to be sure, but it is also about the lack of equity in the marketplace of ideas. It is about taking back our voices from the media-cracy that has silenced and marginalized the 99 percent.
For me the most enduring images of the Occupation before Bloomberg raided Zuccotti Park was the computer bank from which the activists were live-streaming the event around the world. I found out about the occupation, not from the press, but from friends who emailed me links to these websites more than a week before the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge catapulted the protest into the media spotlight. A bunch of bloggers with handheld cameras had scooped the world on what may turn out to be the leading political story of 2011. Equally important, they were bypassing the gate-keepers in the press and telling their own story in their own terms -- arguably the first populist movement in history to do so.
Well, not quite the first. The Arab Spring has that distinction. That the Occupy Movement sprang up hot on the heels of this historic uprising, and indeed resembles it in so many ways, tells us that the worldwide contagion of events, rather than the pronouncements of the self-anointed opinion-makers, is the driving force in the digital age, and the social media rather than the mainstream press is now in the driver's seat.
That may be the biggest news of all to come out of the Occupy Movement.
1 | 2
