Rory OConnor - Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media

New York, November 2011

As I write, demonstrators all over the world have taken to the streets to protest against social, economic and political systemsmany widely regarded as democraticthat simply arent serving their needs. From Cairo to Athens, from New Delhi to Tel Aviv, and from Madrid to a just few miles away here in Manhattan, indignant citizens are rising up and raising their voices to send loud messages of dissatisfaction to the powers-that-be: Big Government, Big Business, and Big Media alike.

Growing networks of ordinary people, many of them young and feeling deeply disenfranchised, are beginning to exert extraordinary influence on societies worldwide. They are using emerging media forms to bypass state censorship, outpace traditional news organizations, and compel corporations and governments alike to listen to and act on their demands. Deeply disruptive new media tools, which now enable them to produce and distribute news and information widely, inexpensively, and efficiently, also help them to attract large audiences, to affect the rise and fall of policies, politicians and entire governments and even to revolutionize entire industries.

Here in the United Stateslong regarded as the global bastion of capitalist democracyan ongoing occupation of Wall Street and the financial district at the epicenter of the worlds continuing economic crisis, continues to grow in impact and importance. Initially ignored or ridiculed by the powerful global media corporations also headquartered here, the demonstrators responded by employing their own mediaincluding viral emails, blogs, social networks like Facebook and other young social platforms, such as the video sharing site YouTube and the micro-blogging Twitter serviceto spread their message by word of mouse.

Dismayed by the corporate medias spotty, cynical coverage and upset at what they viewed as a lack of authentic information being made available about their movement, organizers relied instead on telling their own story, through diverse media that included an online livestream of the occupation, websites, a newspaper, and much, much more. Some in the tech-savvy crowd posted commentary, photographs and video to Twitter and YouTube, even when under arrest. Their friends and followers quickly redistributed the pictures, posts and tweets emanating from what soon became renowned as Occupy Wall Street. Within days the more established media were forced to change their condescending stance and begin to cover the protests in a more comprehensive and respectful manner.

Similar protests soon sprouted elsewhere. The loose-knit campaign that began in New York spread to dozens of other cities across the country, with protesters camped out in Los Angeles near City Hall, assembled before the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago and marching through downtown Boston to rally against corporate greed, unemployment and the role of financial institutions in the economic crisis, as the Agence France-Presse wire service reported. With little organization and a reliance on Facebook, Twitter and Google groups to share methods, the Occupy Wall Street campaign, as the prototype in New York is called, has clearly tapped into a deep vein of anger, experts in social movements said, bringing longtime crusaders against globalization and professional anarchists together with younger people frustrated by poor job prospects.

When New York police arrested more than 700 people on the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2011, it only galvanized their campaign and provided momentum for new rallies and other encampments in cities as disparate as Baltimore, Memphis, Minneapolis, and even the nations capital, where an Occupy DC protest began in a park near the White House. While tens of thousands of union members and
other progressives joined the demonstrators to denounce the power, wealth, and indifference of Americas major financial institutions, Occupy Together, an unofficial hub for the protests, listed sites for hundreds of future demonstrations, including some in Europe and Japan.

Nicholas Kulish chronicled the growing demonstrations in a New York Times report published ten days after the occupation of Wall Street began, noting that the protesters complaints range from corruption to lack of affordable housing and joblessness, common grievances the world over. But from South Asia to the heartland of Europe and now even to Wall Street, these protesters share something else: wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over.

Why are people all over the world coming to similar conclusions and taking to the streets all at once to express them? The answer should be obvious : they feel their social systems have abandoned them. As a result, citizens of all ages, but especially young people, are throwing off old-style, top-down constructs like political parties, traditional media and corporate brands to adopt instead the more participatory and far less hierarchical ways of the Web.