What went wrong in Occupy Wall Street?

What was Occupy Wall Street?

Otherwise known as OWS, Occupy Wall Street was a protest movement in New York City to bring attention to economic inequality, injustice within the financial district, and corruption among corporations and the government. The overall movement was called the Occupy Movement, however the protests in New York were specifically called Occupy Wall Street.

What did Occupy Wall Street accomplish?

The movement received a lot of attention in the media. One of their goals was to bring the issue of income inequality to the forefront of political issues. President Obama was quoted to have said, “”I think it expresses the frustrations the American people feel, that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country …” However, politically, it is hard to measure the movement’s impact. In this article the results of the movement prove to be about the topic spotlight, “The big success of Occupy was to thrust the topic of inequality into the public conversation and into the popular consciousness in a way that it hadn’t been before,” Dr. Ruth Milkman, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says. The impact of this topic has fueled presidential campaigns like Bernie Sanders’. One of his central topics was about income inequality and financial reform. Dr. Milkman continues to articulate the impact by declaring, “Now elected officials, people running for office, and pundits all feel they have to address this issue—and that was not true before 2011.”

What role did social media play?

In the US the most visible accounts of the Occupy movement included the Twitter accounts @OccupyWallStreetNYC3 with 171,000 followers and @OccupyWallStreet4 with 199,000 followers, and the Facebook pages Occupy Wall St5 with 551,000 likes, and Occupy Together6 with 252,000 likes

What is the intersect between leadership and social media?

Social Media played a huge role in getting the word out to bring awareness to income inequality. Many types of social media platforms were used. The most influential platform was Twitter, with the hashtag #OWS. This article examines the usefulness of social media, however it does not address the leaders of the movement, and how they deal with social media and decision making. There were problems among the leadership team of the movement. As the article from class states, “Struggles for the control of key activist accounts should not be seen as trivial and inconsequential incidents, that is, ‘petty squabbles’. These incidents have had tangible consequences for the movements affected… they contributed in creating deep rifts among core activists dividing forces.” (Gerbaudo)

The article we read in class by Gerbaudo articulated three variables to analyze leadership in movements and social media.

(a) their formation and composition

(b) processes of internal organization

(c) power struggles arising around the ownership and control of activist social media assets.

To understand how these variables came to be, we must examine the examples that he provided. Occupy Wall Street had issues with processes of internal organization and power struggles. It is important to be aware of these variables when you look for a movement to have lasting impact online and throughout the world.