news blog | November 21, 2011 | 15 comments

OWS must define its story before others do

Since the first residents descended upon Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, the Occupy Wall Street movement has grown from a few hundred supporters in this tiny enclave to an international discussion. With thousands of people in cities across the globe – from New York to London to Sydney to Rome – announcing their support for economic parity, it’s not all surprising several narratives have emerged.

In the past week, New York City’s mayor, Mike Bloomberg, ordered NYPD to remove the protesters by force, UC Davis police officer John Pike needlessly and cowardly spraying pepper spray at sitting, peaceful students, and Seattle’s Finest shocked the world by pepper-spraying Dorli Rainey, 84-year-old who was at an Occupy Seattle protest. These provide yet additional stirring narratives, but ultimately, as in any public relations campaign, narrative and message need to be focused.

They Have No Message
One of the early narratives has been that, ironically, the Occupy Wall Street supporters have no message. Politicians and business leaders are always advised, “It’s about the message.” The same holds true for the Occupy Movement. But what happens when there are no specific, actionable messages, but broad, and often divergent messages? What happens when the messages aren’t created by the organization, but those who write about them? Does having a message even matter? The short answer is, yes, messaging matters. The longer answer for this particular case is, unfortunately, not as simple. What does matter, however, are the narratives created through the actions of the actors involved and how the audience perceives these narratives. In other words, will the Occupy Wall Street movement get support because of, or despite, these narratives? Up until now, there really has been one main narrative. But that should change.

The Main Narrative
So far, the protests throughout the nation have focused their ire on those they believe have, because of their greed and malfeasance, destroyed our society. The narrative from the protesters has been about holding those in charge of particular companies (Goldman, BoA, etc) accountable for making the vast majority of Americans, in one way or another, suffer – to lose their jobs, their homes, their sense of self-worth.

The protesters aren’t expecting money back or to right all the wrongs through financial gain or even stern justice. The goal is to make life more equitable, to make sure that those who made obscene amounts of money off the backs of masses can never repeat their offenses. This appears to be the main narrative of the protesters, one that is both easily understood and difficult to pin down. In order to help push this narrative, a slogan was created.

We Are The 99%
“We are the 99%” is a powerful slogan. But it’s also a dominant narrative, creating storylines – many of them heartbreaking, all of them relatable – about the economic disparity between those who reside in the top 1% of the wealth food-chain and the rest of us, the 99%. In broad strokes, this slogan sets the tone, and argument, that no matter where you fall – whether you make $23,000 a year or $230,000 a year, it pales in comparison to those in that top 1% (which according to Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, is, at the minimum, $516,633 per year – but let’s be real for a second; those at the bottom of the top 1% are not in the same league as those who make millions+). The implication of the top 1% is that not only do they have the wealth, but the power – or, more acutely, the ears of those who sit in power – to push forth policy and shape how business is done. Or, to put it a different way, to help the top 1% remain the top 1%, to let money beget money, and to widen the chasm between them and everyone else.

This narrative, of course, has its detractors, and not just from the 1%, but also from people who misconstrue the message. Groups such as the “We are the 53%” have arisen to try to put the Occupy Wall Street protesters down by expressing their view that, while they may not be the wealthiest of people, what they have is because they work hard and abide by the rules. This group misses the point of the 99% message: everyone (except the 1%) is in the same boat – we’ve been, to put it colloquially, screwed.

One of the reasons this message has stuck is because of the populist implication. If “We are the 99%” exists, it means, by definition, it crosses political, societal and economic boundaries. A progressive who earns $75,000 a year in New York City is in the same position as a conservative who earns $45,000 a year in French Lick, Indiana. This is the ultimate ‘us vs. them’ message. But how do you deliver a message that does not get diluted and reaches a wide range of ideologically different people?

The Occupy Movement has taken advantage of today’s message disseminating tools. Understanding large media outlets will either ignore or confuse their message, the Movement has taken to the social networks with compelling stories to support the 99% narrative. They’ve created a Twitter account, Tumblr feed, Facebook page to help tell their stories.

However, as any politician or corporate executive faced with a determined media can attest to, distributing the message and controlling the message are two different things. Especially when uncertainty within the media runs high.

Media Create Narratives, Too
According to The New York Times’ Nate Silver, on the first day of the protests, September 17, there were 10 “traditional news accounts” and remained just as low for the next eight days. (Conversely, the first day of Tea Party protests, April 15, 2009, there were 769 media hits, or mentions.) The first big burst in coverage was when NYPD used pepper spray for the first time. This is where the media narrative begins.

These early reports were quick to deride the protesters and their ideas as nothing more than hippy drivel. When, on October 1, protesters shut down the Brooklyn Bridge and the NYPD arrested many, including a Times freelancer, mentions of the movement skyrocketed and media’s questions of the movement went something like this: who are they? What do they want? What do they stand for? Are they serious?

However, as the days turned into weeks, and the movement spread from Manhattan to other parts of the nation the media has settled down and have become a bit more intellectually honest in their reporting. We’re watching the media change the narrative, as many of their own are being arrested and more importantly, blocked from covering protests. Nor Hell a fury like a reporter scorned

The media often creates the narrative through their reporting; the descriptors they use, the frequency of these words and pieces, all shape how the audience perceives the story. As the Occupy movement spreads across the nation and local and national media pick up on these protests, a shift will occur. In favor or against will be determined by how the press frames these stories. Will we see police brutality on protesters or will we see inarticulate protesters interviewed as spokespeople of a movement?

Police Brutality
As mentioned earlier, this week saw a rise in intensity of the ‘police brutality’ narrative. Police departments in New York City, Oakland, Portland, Ore., and at UC Davis, through their actions of apparently random and particularly vicious acts of reprobation, have created (or, sustained, depending who you speak to) the image of the protesters as defenseless voices participating in non-violent actions. When our nation’s top diplomat espouses words of warning to despots around the world about allowing their citizens to gather peacefully and exchange ideas, but law enforcers in the United States seem to find them inconvenient at best, meaningless at worst, the ‘police state’ narrative only strengthens.

The images from Oakland – those of protesters shot point-blank in the face with rubber bullets, those of smoke-filled streets, the images from New York – those of protesters bending over in agony from being sprayed in the face with pepper spray, those of thousands of people in the nation’s densest city walking up Broadway – do more to inspire empathy from people than demands of inequity.

Couple these images with stats of economic disparity, as well as language from ordinary people who have lost everything, then have them spread from platform to platform, from device to device, and watch how angry people can get. The whole world has the ability to watch. Then think about how, after coming home from work or school, people sit around the dinner table talking about what they saw online: “Hey, did you see what happened in San Francisco today?” much in the same way people sat at the dinner table a generation ago and watched the mass medium of the day, television, as their brothers, fathers, neighbors come home from Vietnam in body bags. Images matter. They tell a story.

The protest movement has migrated to scores of U.S. cities, and besides the general debate within the group (how do we define ourselves? Where do we see this going? Etc), the underlying current is not the what, i.e. the message, but the how. With the use of social tools to exponentially deliver both the protester’s messages and aggressive response from police and politicians, Occupy Wall Street is creating a narrative that is relatable: we are pursuing our First Amendment rights and look what the government is doing. They’re shooting at us, arresting us for peacefully assembling. This narrative is a strong one.

The narratives of Occupy Wall Street are at an inflection point, where the story intertwines with the outcry of the public, the vitriol against business leaders and the repudiation of our elected officials. Make the story about bad business and bad politics, where even if you like your representative, admit they have failed you. With mayors across the nation taking action to rid their cities of protests, the Occupy movement can now focus its attention on affecting real change by shifting the narrative to those in office.

  1. groups:
    news blog,   Occupy Wall Street Blog
  2. tags:
    occupy wall street
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15 comments // OWS must define its story before others do

  • Dissent4Liberty
    • +2
      Dissent4Liberty  

    • Occupy Wall Street is not about "economic parity".

      Thanks for fanning the movement with your disinfo. It's articles like this that clarify what co-opt means. Writer missed the mark just as Mainstream Media and Bloomberg will always miss the mark. I have, up until this flagged article, enjoyed and respected the content here. Please have your editors look at this again.

      In NO way should #OWS define their agenda/movement/story ..... Authority is doing it for them in it's ever obvious criminal ways. Occupy is the movement ...We want our Country back!

      This movement is brilliant with the simplistic motive of Rising against The Machine. It's about the USA CITIZENS doing their humane duty to make amends to the world for our Regimes wrath.
      Every form of Government is entrusted with power to maintain the way of it's peoples wishes. Sooner or later things run a muck. Enter revolution and "Regime Change", to quote our "Elected Officials" in Washington for Middle East countries. (PNAC, Bolton, Graham)

      TheKuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal was this past week in which both Bush and Blair were found GUILTY of crimes against humanity during the Iraq War.

      An editor-in-chief of a popular magazine was hung for war crimes at Nuremberg by the name of Julius Streicher.
      I look forward to the day when Murdock and ALL other Mainstream talking heads complicit of war crimes lose their lives to the JUSTIFIED verdicts.

      Occupy Wall Street DOES NOT have to define their story, Our Criminal Government is doing for us so gloriously well..... it's getting better everyday.

    • 6 months ago
  • Incredulous
    • +2
      Incredulous  

    • I find your suggestion that the OWS movement has no message both naive and short-sighted. If the movement was without a message, it wouldn't have such widespread support. In fact, the message is found in a multitude of voices, not one voice, one message, one sign, or one way to brand the movement into a message. The longer OWS can hold on to the multitudinous nature of its appeal, the longer it can, and will, prevent itself from being co-opted into yet another product to market or sell.

    • 6 months ago
  • TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA
  • TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA
  • TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA
    • -2
      TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA  

    • thank god now hey jews, muslims christian all free, but we have to protect the jews because the middle east is crazy ppl, and everyone wants to hurt them because the rothshilds purposedly made them out to look bad so that fake muslims and the crazy ppl egyptians would try to harm them..so we protect them because we have to

    • 6 months ago
  • TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA
  • TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA
    • -2
      TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA  

    • now remeber god cast 'fallen angels" to earth...(genesis)...at the begining angels from ourspace comingled with the human race,now believe it or not they live in this underground city and are afraid of the sun....this angles are demons(satin)...very bad, now they are afraid of regular humns..like me or whomever, they are afraid of the sun...they stay underground and the humans they comingled with they say under there to...turns out this fallen angles were also homossexuals....they dont understand why men and women are supposed to comingle...now america has used this alien race for their technology for the purpose of greater good...the entire earth we have on survelance amazing...now whats happening is the aliens underground are actually go to burn when the earth's core (the hot lava) contiunes to grow and burn this angles underground forever and ever, they swim thru lava in pain and agony

    • 6 months ago
  • TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA
  • TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA
  • TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA
    • -2
      TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA  

    • father says if you love my son he loves us..Jesus says..I am the path to the father...to us ...we christians are kinda dumb becausse the real jewish person understands their connection to david...but a christian has to read it and then understand david cant be our only jesus can...the only way the father can love us is thru jesus, jesus is god remeber david says his son's' kingdom rules for 1000 years

    • 6 months ago
  • TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA
    • -2
      TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA  

    • im a real christian, when to rutgers college, rutgers, new brunswick, became a brother at the jewish frat, aepi, love the jews like jesus says in revelations we protect them and hey eventually they see thru christian protection of israel that jesus christ is and was the eternal son of god, david, lineage correlates, jesus was in fact related to david...david tauht his only one true son how to live forever and never die as a human being, we christians give him so much glory because we know he is alive...and we know in fact david who is the father says if you love my son her loves us...so whatever we can agree to disagree...Obama is good..turns out evidence now shows that George Soros is Barry Soetoro, Obama is an American citizen born in Hawii..

    • 6 months ago
  • TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA
  • TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA
    • -2
      TwinCvANiLLAsPiLLA  

    • Occupy movement has grown to the point that now these protesters are flying over on private jets and occupying the United Kingdom, the U.K. has enslaved the jews, America and Obama are here to free them from England...the jews are freed for once the first time in history, we continue to protect israel, no matter how much it costs, we love the jewish race, pure bloods, first slaves, enslaved by egypt, then enslaved by the rothshilds(english, non jewish, pretending they are jewish)...america's military by far surpassing the knowledge of human man kind thought process because our underground installation that inhabitants aliens have given technology tht can destroy a nation in one second, now we love israel and thats the bottom line because the rock said, the aliens aint coming they work for us..god bless america, Cia ...the rothschilds and england have enslaved them...

    • 6 months ago
  • Karlek
    • +1
      Karlek  

    • The Return to Equality

      In and around 10,000 bce (in the mideast), in order to exploit the recently invented technology of agriculture, the human species went from an infrastructure that was equal-on-the-average to one that was follow-the-leader.

      The equal-on-the-average infrastructure has a shaman who deals with chronic problems as required and a hunting-chief who leads the hunting-band as required. The shaman and the hunting-chief satisfy certain requirements that make them equal-on-the-average.

      The follow-the-leader infrastructure has a permanent chief who, with assistants, forms an aristocracy. Because the leader is not required to be equal-on-the-average, the follow-the-leader infrastructure is not as stable as the equal-on-the-average infrastructure. When it fails it is generally replaced by another of the same kind.

      Around 1500ce, (in Europe) the technology of the ocean-going ship was developed sufficiently that shipmasters and traders could travel and exchange trinkets for tchotchkes, which were exotic goods that were rare enough to be used as status symbols. These could be brought back to Europe and sold to local leaders. The shipmasters and traders (and bankers, who were traders in money) became rich, but did not have the status of the leader class, called the aristocracy.

      Calvin invented a new class, the elect, who had the characteristic that they were blessed by God. The way you could identify the elect was that they prospered, i.e., they were rich. In other words, capitalism is a device that was invented by Calvin in order to give the mercantile interests that supported Calvinism the same kind of social status that the earlier military (and, later, landed) aristocracy had.

      Calvin's elect constituted a quasi-aristocracy that were considered better than ordinary people, because they were rich, but not as much better as traditional aristocrats. They constituted a "middle class".

      The religious aspect of the Calvinist elect was soon lost as investment became just another technology. Capitalism became the notion that a person who acquires money that is surplus to survival needs has status equivalent to a person who has social rank (e.g., an aristocrat or senior bureaucrat).

      A surplus of money usually conveys more status if it is held for longer or inherited than if is recently stolen but that is less important than it was in the past. The method of the initial acquisition of the surplus money is unimportant. By a series of transformations capitalism currently provides status for senior members of the government bureaucracy (democrats) and senior members of the corporate bureaucracy (republicans).

      The net effect of capitalism is that from 1500 to 1950 it provided the social function of reversing the earlier change from equality-on-the-average (which functioned from 100,000bce to 8,000bce) to follow-the-leader (which functioned from 8,000bce to 1500 ce). This gradual increase in status of the middle class is called upward mobility.

      From 1500 ce to 1950 ce upward mobility was certified by the display of status symbols or tchotchkes. However, it was recognized by economists in the 1950s that continuation of this practice would create shortages of resources for tchotchkes; so the policy of the elite from 1950 was to reverse evolution and make the middle and lower classes downwardly mobile.

      Since capitalism no longer provides the useful evolutionary function of gradually making everybody equal, capitalism will no longer have any useful social or evolutionary function and it can cease to exist. Since we have already decided that a particular skin color, childhood language, birth location, political or religious opinion, or gender do not determine status, we can easily decide that neither does the accumulation of tchotchkes.

      Then we can eliminate money as a medium of exchange and replace it with computer accounts.

      That will leave only position in the bureaucracy as a potential measure of status and most bureaucrats requiring contact with humans can be replaced by Turing-pass voices like the "Siri" in the iPhone 4S.

      Human workers may still be necessary but they should only serve in positions that:
      (1) require more creativity than robots are capable of
      (2) can have input and output through Turing-pass voices like "Siri".
      (3) do not require contact with other human beings

      That will eliminate bureaucratic position as a basis for status.
      After a while, when people get used to not having a hierarchy based on skin color, gender, bureaucratic position, childhood
      language, and the like; these can be relaxed to guidelines rather than hard and fast rules.

      The function of the government shall be to:

      (1) Provide whatever food, clothing, shelter and other health services are necessary for everyone's survival and to distribute these goods and services equitably; and

      (2) Make those provisions on the most efficient possible basis with the minimum damage to the environment. Note that most of the direct interaction with humans can be done by robots (most being in non-human form) because that will generally be the most consistent. Note that by maximizing efficiency rather than minimizing cost the criterion provides for maximum utility.

      (3) Provide equal access to available surplus resources that are not needed for survival of the global population to allow for individuals to express creativity not otherwise provided for in (1) and (2), and

      (4) to provide a social mechanism for coping with unanticipated conditions or needs.

      The current activity of "Occupy Wall Street" serves to call attention to the lack of a useful function for capitalism, and thus facilitate its extinction.

      A discussion of evolutionary progress from 100,000 bce to 2011ce is provided in:
      [ http://rEvolution.karleklund.net].

      A projection of evolutionary progress in the future is provided in:
      [ http://utopia.karleklund.net]

    • 6 months ago
  • percipi224
    • +1
      percipi224  
    • Karlek:

      very interesting I will read more. Your summation of history of tchotchkes also is almost flippant. The museums of the world are filled with tchotchkes, art, beauty, ceramics statues. So, to me its not the "dust catchers" on my shelves, my mothers music box, my hand made stain glass or the nice hundred year old rugs from a junk store that have been the driving force, but power. the very wealthy say cryptically; "its not the money" as if their grabbing resources, speculating on failure as a good for humanity. they don't say except in private, because its the game, the power. pure and simple. What the elite throughout the ages when they do rise always hate is when the followers start questioning and stop following. The elite always forget the power of the people to say NO. The premise of the article is to help those same elite (yeah right as he preaches to the choir here) understand there is a message an intersectionalism of message because the individual messages are taken twisted and thrown back in that persons or small groups face. They hate that we are joining forces. I can put it in terms they can all understand. 1. Give Peace a Chance. 2. Greed is not good. 3. we are all in this together 4. Our planet is dying.
      Don't need to know no history to understand. If it don't apply to the 53% or the patriotic millionares or two billionares than don't reply. If it don't apply dont reply. Those who think things are great can stay in thier world view, but more people dont' see it that way and are saying so. But they aren't allowed to excersice their first amendment (mispellings and all) unless its to praise the system of militarized elite.

    • 6 months ago
JoshSternberg
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