You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Media’ category.
A recent CBS poll found that 43% of Americans agree with the views of Occupy Wall Street, with only 27% disagreeing. (Other polls have found similar sentiments.) But what do these numbers mean?
Here’s some historical context:
- In 1959, five years after Brown v. Board of Ed, a 53-37 majority of Americans thought the decision had “caused a lot more trouble than it was worth.”
- In 1961, Americans believed by a 57-28 margin that civil rights demonstrations were doing more harm than good to the cause of integration.
- In October 1964, some 57% of Americans thought racial integration was moving “too fast,” and only 18% thought it wasn’t moving fast enough.
- In 1971, a national poll found only 39% percent of Americans “sympathetic … with efforts of the women’s liberation groups,” with 47% unsympathetic.
That’s right. More Americans support Occupy Wall Street than supported Brown v. Board of Ed in 1959, the civil rights movement in 1961, desegregation in 1964, or feminism in 1971.
Oh, and here’s one more: In 1948, Americans disapproved of “women of any age wearing slacks in public” by a 39-34 margin.
Yep. OWS is more popular today than pants on women was 63 years ago.
The Council of University of California Faculty Associations, an umbrella group representing faculty bodies throughout the UC system, has released a statement “in solidarity with and in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement now underway in our city and elsewhere” and is urging UC faculty to endorse that statement on an individual and collective basis.
OWS, they say, “aims to bring attention to the various forms of inequality – economic, political, and social – that characterize our times, that block opportunities for the young and strangle the hopes for better futures for the majority while generating vast profits for a very few.” The statement ends with a call for “all members of the University of California community to lend their support to the peaceful and potentially transformative movement.”
Good stuff. But it stands in stark contrast to CUCFA’s silence on the student protests that have been sweeping the UC system for more than two years, and its timidity in addressing the root causes of those protests.
The current wave of UC student agitation began in earnest in the fall of 2009, sparked by plans for huge tuition hikes in the system. In November of that year, one week before the Regents’ fee hike vote, CUCFA called for a “postponement” of the vote to ensure “transparency, accountability, and fair consideration of other options” in the decision-making process. They did not oppose the hike itself.
CUCFA was silent the following month when sixty-six Berkeley students were arrested in the course of a peaceful, non-disruptive occupation on campus, and they remained silent throughout the wave of protest and repression that followed. In November 2010 they expressed “concern” about an incident in which a UC police officer drew a gun on student protesters and the UC system lied about why, but they released no statement condemning the incident and took no action in opposition to it. They remained silent as well as student activists’ due process rights were violated in campus judicial proceedings
The University of California has engaged in a massive campaign of intimidation, disruption, and physical violence against student activists since 2009, and CUCFA has — as far as can be determined from their own website’s archive of their public statements — never once stood up in support of the students’ protests or in opposition to those protests’ suppression.
Is this OWS endorsement a first step toward a new CUCFA policy?
One can only hope.
Youth culture scholars Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick have a thought-provoking op-ed in today’s New York Times, one that challenges a lot of the assumptions teachers and parents bring to bullying discussions.
High school students, they’ve found, rarely use the word bullying to describe even the most obvious examples of such behavior. Instead, they — particularly girls — dismiss it as “drama.”
Dismissing a conflict that’s really hurting their feelings as drama lets teenagers demonstrate that they don’t care about such petty concerns. They can save face while feeling superior to those tormenting them by dismissing them as desperate for attention. Or, if they’re the instigators, the word drama lets teenagers feel that they’re participating in something innocuous or even funny, rather than having to admit that they’ve hurt someone’s feelings. Drama allows them to distance themselves from painful situations.
Adults want to help teenagers recognize the hurt that is taking place, which often means owning up to victimhood. But this can have serious consequences. To recognize oneself as a victim — or perpetrator — requires serious emotional, psychological and social support, an infrastructure unavailable to many teenagers. And when teenagers like Jamey do ask for help, they’re often let down.
No student wants to be identified as a victim. And so…
Antibullying efforts cannot be successful if they make teenagers feel victimized without providing them the support to go from a position of victimization to one of empowerment. When teenagers acknowledge that they’re being bullied, adults need to provide programs similar to those that help victims of abuse. And they must recognize that emotional recovery is a long and difficult process.
Boyd and Marwick highlight a fundamental contradiction in anti-bullying campaigns. Adult rhetoric treats bullying as serious business, but adults in positions of power in such environments rarely exercise that power in ways that back up that rhetoric.
Adults: think back to the worst example of bullying you experienced or witnessed in high school. Now imagine that behavior taking place in a workplace, an adult social setting, a college classroom. Imagine how it would be addressed in such a context. The gap between what you imagine and what you saw in high school is the gap between society’s rhetoric on bullying and students’ reality. And in most cases that gap is vast.
The Daily Show has been on vacation since Occupy Wall Street broke big in the media, so last night’s show was their chance to play catch-up. And they made some … well … odd choices.
Stewart led off the four-minute segment by calling OWS “the Hard Rock Cafe of leftist movements” before doing a gag about OWS’s fundraising prowess and another snarking on Mitt Romney’s opportunism. But the segment’s last — and longest — bit was this one:
“Of course it hasn’t been all good news for the movement. For all their popularity, for all the participants with thoughtful critiques of our power structure, there’s also this: A guy taking a shit [bleeped] on a police car.
“You know what? Guy shitting [bleeped] on a police car? Meet me at camera three.
“NO! NO! BAD! [mimes spraying with water bottle, whacking with rolled up newspaper] NO! NAUGHTY! NAUGHTY!
” ‘Cause here’s the problem. Unfortunately, protests are often as much about optics as they are about substance. And you do not want this [photoshopped photo of Chinese democracy protester shitting on row of tanks] to be your Tiananmen Square. You have tapped into a real injustice that people feel about the global financial markets. Nothing can derail your movement faster than someone who is unable to derail their movements.”
Now, I get it. It’s hard to resist a poop joke. I get that.
But here’s the thing.
In a grassroots movement like this, individual people are going to do stupid things on occasion. It’s unfortunate, but there’s no way to stop it. And as long as everyone recognizes that fact, and is attentive to the distinction between bad acts that reflect movement culture and bad acts that don’t, the those occasional moments of jackassery aren’t a huge deal.
Which is to say that no, Jon Stewart, some idiot taking a dump on a cop car (ten days ago!) isn’t going to “derail the movement.”
No. What derails movements isn’t random acts of jackassery. What derails movements is the disproportionate attention such acts sometimes draw, and the endless hand-wringing that sometimes ensues.
Luckily, that hasn’t happened here. A Google search on the cop car story returns nearly half a million hits, but that’s less than a tenth of a percent of the half a billion hits that “occupy wall street” gets on its own. The incident got a bit of attention when it happened, then mostly sank under the waves as actual news kept happening and folks moved on.
But not everyone is able to resist a poop joke, and not everyone is able to resist an opportunity to lecture activists about “optics.”
And so last night Jon Stewart and his Daily Show writers pulled down their pants and squatted.
Naughty, naughty.
The ongoing saga of Twitter’s seeming censorship of activist trending topics got new datapoint in the wake of the arrest of a hundred Occupy Boston demonstrators late last night — the phrase “Occupy Boston” trended globally for a while this morning, while #OccupyBoston, with three times the total traffic, did not.
What’s curious about this is the fact that unlike the failed TTs I’ve discussed in the past, the trendlines for Occupy Boston and #OccupyBoston were quite similar before last night’s surge. In fact, the two terms rose almost exactly in sync yesterday until #OccupyBoston shot up as the arrests began after midnight. Now, #OccupyBoston had seen more traffic in previous days, but those raw numbers were tiny, and I don’t think they explain the failure of the tag to trend. Rather, I think the after-midnight spike holds the answer.
Why did #OccupyBoston spike so heavily as the arrests took place? Because of intensive, concerted efforts by OWS supporters to get the word out. And as I’ve noted before, Twitter (and it’s algorithm genies) hate intensive, concerted efforts — they don’t want anyone gaming their system but them.
But while #OccupyBoston was getting tweeted and retweeted by that (admittedly large and growing) core group, Occupy Boston was being tweeted and retweeted by a much broader and more diverse crowd — the kind of people who aren’t up on the latest hashtags. Those folks — journalists, local Bostonians, curious onlookers from all over the world — gave Occupy Boston a breadth of traffic that #OccupyBoston lacked, and the oomph to put it onto the trending topics list on a global basis.
I should make it clear that all this is an educated guess on my part, rather than established fact. Twitter doesn’t release much info about their algorithms. But I shook some Twitter folks out of the woodwork last year when this came up around #Wikileaks, and everything I’ve said here jibes with what I learned from them (and my own investigations) back then.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments