Gawkers
The reporting, and to some degree reception, of the OWS protest(s) is interesting in light of the American left’s last paroxysm of social activism: the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle. The style and content of that protest has an enormous determining effect on social-justice efforts of the following decade. Rhetoric was specific, academic, stern, confrontational. Tactics were aggressive, theatrical, blunt, and tightly regimented. You can see that reflected in how the protests were covered, from the colloquial name they were given (“Battle in Seattle”) to the images of tear gas and street conflict that persist in our popular understanding.
Most reporting from OWS, though - even and especially the good reporting - has been, in many ways, the exact opposite of that. Reporters are generally welcomed and included. In some cases, the writers already are (or become) active participants in the protests. The site is open, stationary but persistent: people can come and look. The protesters seem in it for the long haul rather than interested in a big, attention-getting blowup. It’s even more striking given that there have been clashes with police, but our most common image of the protests is just a bunch of people sitting with signs in a park. The idea is not to demonstrate resolve but to seize and hold a patch of discourse, to keep it stable for long enough that people who might not normally be aware of their concerns can come around and pay attention.
There are lots of reasons why this might be the case. One is changes in media norms: as my colleague Damon Di Cicco has pointed out, where the media used to portray protesters as dangerous outside agitators, now they attempt to minimize protest by emphasizing it as a nuisance to “normal” citizens. There are changes in media production, too, where blogging has made it possible for citizen journalists to produce in-depth, contextually informed reporting about the protests to counteract the reporting of professional reporters who, under deadline pressures, would be more likely to dip a toe in and write about that. And there are changes in organizing, too, where the Internet makes it possible for a diffuse group to productively come together.
I think that image of taking up residence - initially conceived as a kind of shallow, ironic joke about Israeli “occupation,” but slowly becoming something far more profound - is what’s really succeeded. Rather than conceptualizing the efforts as a conflict that can be won or lost and demands acceded to or rejected, this sit-and-watch strategy makes it a more resonant symbolic act. It’s avoiding the rationalist trap, finding a way to mimic the contradictory messages of power structures in a small-scale setting. We are all mostly gawkers to politics, looky-loos on the outside who only become involved when something really important happens. They’re catering to that impulse, making a space for casual participants and opening themselves up to observers who might be more interested in understanding what’s going on than in actively taking part. And in that way, I think it is a much more meaningful communication.
