Media Ecology and the Occupy Movement
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Rule of inference
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:13
Thank you. My name is Christine Schweidler. I'm Sasha Costanza-Chock. And today we're going to talk to you both about media ecology, but actually starting out
00:22
with a framing around research, Occupy Research, introduce to you what the Occupy Research Network is about. I'm going to start by introducing my organization and introducing sort of what our framing is around research justice as a pre -context to what Occupy Research is about, or at least for some of us who are part of the Occupy Research Network.
00:40
And then I'll pass it over to Sasha who's going to talk about media ecology coming out of some of the research that we did as well. So just a reminder, keep these in mind if anybody has internet. So I work for an organization called Data Center. Data Center is not actually a data center, as in we don't have a group of servers where we store a bunch of data.
01:02
It's a 30-year-old organization that's relatively small. It's a nonprofit that partners with social justice organizations to do research for their grassroots campaigns largely, but also with social movements as well. We have a long history of trying to provide information to the movement. We actually started out as a library service, so a clipping service from the 70s into the 90s, particularly around
01:24
work that was going on or, you know, things that were going on in Latin America, Central America, and Southeast Asia. It was radical librarians sitting in a room, clipping articles in order to provide, you know, social movement actors with the information that they needed for the work that they were doing. After that, things sort of started to transform. The need for that changed a lot with the age of the net.
01:46
And Data Center's work started to move towards doing, you know, whatever organizations really needed Data Center to do, which became a lot of campaign research, target research, corporate research, that kind of work. Into the 2000s, though, we've really transitioned to partnering with organizations to
02:01
do research and build research capacity with grassroots organizations and alliance members. Some of our key partners for folks who are not in the U.S. context, some of these folks actually do work internationally, but we work right now just to give you a sense of some of the amazing projects that I at least have a chance to work on. We're working with an organization called Global Action Project, looking at how youth are using media for their social justice organizing work.
02:25
Working with an organization called Justice for Families, which is an alliance of organizations that represent families who are trying to radically transform the juvenile justice system in the United States. And I'm going to give you sort of an example of what we're doing with the Domestic Workers Alliance, work that we've done with them in the past and that we may do with them in an international context in the future.
02:43
But ultimately, what we are trying to do at Data Center is transform the way knowledge production is happening by recognizing some really kind of key problems that the communities that we work with, which are largely low-income communities of color, in the United States, but at one point internationally and hopefully once again in the future, we'll be working international context, which is that
03:02
a lot of the communities that we work with have little or no access to the information that is used to make decisions about them. They are often either misrepresented or underrepresented in media sources and in policy work that's happening. Very frequently, they are experiencing violation of either their community or their individual rights, have very little or no
03:23
control over the knowledge that's produced about them, and their knowledge and their data is often seen as not legitimate. So these are communities that are subject of research. Exactly. And so many have been traumatized actually in the past by the research process. Either it's just straight out extractive or ultimately is used against them in some way.
03:43
So this is actually this image. This slide is really based on a popular education tool that we use when we're working with communities where we're trying to sort of declare what we're trying to do. We know that a lot of policymakers are using mainstream sources, census data, economic data, and so on to make policies about communities.
04:00
We know that a lot of communities don't have access to that same data about themselves. We know that seldom are community sources, community knowledge, community data used to make policy decisions. So ultimately, this is what our kind of goal is, is to shift this, to bring access to whatever information to communities that communities need that is being used. This right to know, like whatever that information is, whether it's census data or other kinds of data,
04:23
whatever is being used that impacts your community, that your community has the right to know that information. And then to sort of discontinue this relegation of community voices as essentially stories, as anecdotes, and bring those sources and that input to bear on the process of policy making.
04:41
So I'm just going to give you a super quick example. Time-wise, actually, that's kind of what I'm thinking about at the time. So in the United States, several years ago, well actually just kind of backing up for a second for folks who aren't familiar with the U.S. context, domestic workers, folks who take care of children, folks who are working, cleaning homes, et cetera, et
05:04
cetera, and agricultural workers in the United States are among the most vulnerable workers in the U.S. They are largely excluded from labor law protections. Recognizing that that is true, the domestic workers united in New York several years ago really wanted to upset this process of domestic workers being excluded from labor protection.
05:25
And with that, together with data center, decided to launch the first ever research project that would sort of create a data set that did not exist that represented what was going on with communities. So starting from the very process of creating surveys, what are the questions that we need to know?
05:40
What does the data have to be to demonstrate what our communities are experiencing? And from that, they really sort of transitioned communities to being at the center of what that knowledge production was to being considered the experts on issues affecting those communities, which led to the passing of a bill of rights for domestic workers.
06:00
We're doing this now with the National Domestic Workers Alliance in the United States. Maybe some of you have heard about this work. It's actually really been a phenomenal experience for us to work with them on this. We're looking forward to being able to launch the report, the national report here in just a couple of months. But really, we're starting out with, again, with domestic workers themselves.
06:21
What are the questions that we need to ask? What is the data that we need to collect? Who's going to collect it? We're going to collect it. And then even taking that to its logical conclusion, which is that we will analyze that data together, interpret it together for our own purposes. And just quickly, so the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York City for the first time guarantees household workers, you know, it's 40 hours of work, overtime pay, sick leave.
06:48
Basically, all of the protections that any other category of worker has now for the first time in US history belongs to domestic workers in New York. And that's then being carried over into this national organizing project. Exactly. So, I mean, what this, all this kind of is trying to, what I'm trying to sort of point
07:04
to now is really what our framing that we are sort of, that data center is pushing towards as what we think is kind of a critical part of supporting movements, which is a research justice agenda for movement building. And in that is the presumption that our movements need to have access to information, our communities need to have access to information,
07:22
and that we need to be able to have the power to define the type of legitimate knowledge that is brought to bear on the issues that we are facing. That we have the right to produce that knowledge and use that knowledge as we see fit. And that we are able to have control and legitimacy at different stages of the research process.
07:40
So what does that have to do with Occupy? So, at the point when Occupy launched, it was a really exciting moment for us. Now, data center has a long history of working with grassroots groups and social movement organizations, many of whom, at least initially, were also skeptical about whether or not this Occupy movement would grow to include those movements and those roots in the work that was ahead.
08:01
But Occupy research is an open, well, what is it? Okay. So it's an open and distributed shared space for research. It was very much a come one, come all, which for data center at least was something new. We are a movement research organization. We do support movement research for specific ends to improve, you know, towards whatever campaigns that the movement groups that we work with work towards.
08:23
That is not true for everybody who is part of Occupy research. People are doing research for many different reasons. But at the end of the day, there are some shared goals for this community, and really, sharing is one of those primary goals. What do we share? We share research questions, methods, tool, data, analysis.
08:41
So the network launched on September 20th as just an ether pad that very quickly got trolled. So we moved to a Wikispaces and then people started aggregating to it. We've since moved to our own WordPress instance, but at this point, there are over 350 researchers who are participating in the network doing a wide range of stuff. And again, it's a very wide range of people as well with very different sort of agendas.
09:04
We have a lot of students. We have a lot of academics. We also have a lot of folks who are part of research working groups that are in Occupy camps as well. And why are folks doing it? Well, a lot of folks actually have very many different reasons. A lot of us came together with the belief that research was going to be central and important for movement
09:23
building, for movement strategy, for looking at how, you know, even in the Occupy movement itself, like the movement could examine itself and use whatever it found there to kind of decide how to address certain issues it was facing, to, you know, choose not to reproduce race, class, gender, sexuality, other kinds of inequalities within the movement itself, but also be
09:43
able to discuss itself to the world and generate or challenge or add to different narratives that were being created about Occupy. And why else? Well, everybody else is looking at us. So I think, you know, and this being a very defensive kind of statement, you know, it's important to understand how you're being represented.
10:03
So what are folks doing? This is a very, very short partial list of a very, very long spreadsheet where folks were basically posting the projects that they were working on, recruiting folks to work on it. It was a really wonderful process at the beginning. It was an intensive amount of coordination. We were doing weekly and then eventually biweekly calls where folks were announcing the kind of projects that they were working on, why they were working on them,
10:26
looking for affinity groups to work on these projects, and trying to understand what it meant to coordinate with an open network of folks. From a lot of different folks. And it has been very facilitative of connecting processes. We ourselves, Data Center, worked on a lot on the coordination, but we also worked on two projects, the survey project, which we lovingly call OGGS, because that's just so catchy.
10:48
And we'll share that, some of the results of that survey. I will, and then Sasha will talk about some of the media results. But we were also trying to create an Occupy research handbook, which was essentially intended to be a handbook that gives two movement actors some of the research tools that were being developed by movement actors for the purpose of movement research.
11:04
Can you go back one second? So we also very quickly realized that there were 100 different research teams that were all trying to scrape the public Twitter data from Occupy related hashtags. And I was like, why is everybody doing this without coordinating? So one of the things was also sort of shared data collection tools, teaching each other
11:24
how to do that, and then pooling resources so that there's not as much sort of replication of the same exact process. So this is just the cover page of the Occupy research survey. It was a completely open process. It
11:42
was completely interesting to work on it in this way. There was no distinct single partner, although a group of folks really did emerge. It was openly developed from start to finish. It was a four-week development process, which for those of you doing surveys, maybe that seems like a short time because you're really speedy, but for us, when we're partnering with folks, it actually takes quite a long time to decide what you're going to work on.
12:02
What we did was basically called for several sessions where folks could come and weigh in on what the survey design was going to look like. We had a very specific goal, which was to identify the demographics and participation of folks who were working in the movement to look at their media practices and so on. There were other folks who were doing similar research, so we weren't starting from scratch, and we were inviting those folks to kind of join us
12:24
and try to make the survey as comparable as possible as well to some of the other work that was going on out in the world. I don't know if Zainab is in here now. Yeah, she is. I would shout out to Martha who is not here in her class. It was a university -based class that piloted the survey and did a lot of work to kind of support the process.
12:45
We had several open trainings. The intention was to have it be face-to-face as well as online. We sort of lost out on that because as we were finishing up, basically all the camps were being raided and dismantled. Then it was ultimately going to become an online survey for this iteration. If the camps reoccupy, we hope to kind of rejoin them there.
13:06
If you're angry that our survey was only online and the data is not as good as Zainab's awesome data from Tahrir, you can blame the police who shut down all the camps just when we were ready to do the face-to-face. We still collected 5,000 surveys inside of several weeks. Once it was closed, we actually also again had an open coding
13:29
process where a collective process of folks who were interested came in and looked at the data, coded it and so on. Certainly for location because our ultimate goal was to take the data and release the data to the
13:40
world after it was anonymized for the camps to use to analyze on their own for their own purposes. That data is available now and I'll show you here a link to where you could even explore it in a minute. We also had a couple of hackathons. Sasha is going to talk about some of the first round of hackathon which was looking at Twitter data but we also did a hackathon with this survey data as well.
14:01
It was a, what was it, like five city kind of hackathon. Folks gathered in all these different sites, took this raw data set, looking at different indicators. This visualization here is kind of an early brainstorm. We knew what variables we had. We were visualizing different ways to look at the data and recreate the data and kind of examine the data. One of the insanely awesome people who was there, Charlie Detar, in two days actually built a tool to allow folks to directly explore the data.
14:28
There's a link here if you want. This automatically does cross tabs if you want to explore the data yourself. You can simply click around and it starts to cut the data by whatever indicator you're interested in. You just want to look at, you know, for example, you know, women who, or
14:45
people who identified as women who participated to a certain extent, et cetera, et cetera. You can continue to cut the data to look at responses that you're interested in. Most of our data came from the urban areas within the United States.
15:01
And just to kind of quickly give you an overview of some of the findings, and again, this is an online sample. It's a self-selected sample. It was not, you know, it was, again, just totally online, largely actually through Facebook and Twitter and personal e-mails and networks. Although we did post it to every existing Facebook-related Occupy group based on this long list
15:21
of Facebook group links that had been assembled through another shared data process through the Occupy research network. And then we used an iMacro script to do that. So we did hit all of them. And I think your Facebook account got shut down because we did it too fast initially. So just so you know, the magic number is apparently 200 before you were called a spammer.
15:41
And I was shut down for a couple weeks, but we found a way to kind of slow it down. But I mean, the point being, we were posting the survey to Occupy sites around the world as well. Facebook pages, that is. And, you know, unsurprisingly, Occupy is, as many people have called it, a largely white movement within the United States.
16:01
This is this sample. We actually are about to hopefully sort of see some sample from face-to-face, May Day surveys that were done relatively recently, well, obviously. Ruth Milkman has a team of people that just did a rolling protest face-to-face survey for May Day in New York City. So we're going to look at her data compared to this one.
16:23
We were surprised to see over 15% of folks identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer. I'll let you kind of look at this. Also surprised to see this sort of employment status. A lot of folks identifying as employed full-time, a lot of folks identifying as middle class, a lot of students, of course.
16:43
And a lot of folks sort of up on, you know, this is household income, this is not individual income reported at, you know, somewhere between, you know, whatever, 0 and 30,000, 0 and 40,000 as household income. Very well educated. These actually amount to something like 93%. This is some college
17:03
or a college degree or a graduate, graduate work and or a graduate degree. So essentially we're talking about, at least for this, again, for this online survey, a well educated, low income, but class identity, middle class, group of folks that are largely white that are participating in the movement.
17:21
And Sasha's going to talk a little bit later about some of what that implies and the dialogue that the movement has had. We've actually, as we presented these results back and other folks we know who are finding similar results are receiving really a lot of resistance to even having a discussion of race within the Occupy movement. Some believe it's divisive, some believe we believe it's very necessary to think about, you know, what it means to do movement building.
17:42
This is just Gilad Lutan and Nadia Afghani actually made this really lovely visualization. The question was, you know, what are some, what are the top three reasons that you occupy? I'm just showing you because it's pretty, but largely what people said was this. They said, you know, economic inequalities, economic injustice, income inequalities, what you would expect.
18:01
Very much kind of identifying around the values of like, you know. We also asked them why they don't occupy and the number one and two reasons I think were mostly fear and police. And time. Time, right. Time was probably the number one. So a lot of folks have also said that they sort of had the sense that the Occupy movement was not directly connected to existing civil society.
18:22
What we found, at least from this sample, was that that was not the case. So, you know, it was a really large number of folks who were saying that they voted. It was something like 59% of people who participated in the survey said that Occupy was not their first social movement that they had participated in. And a lot of people identified with different kinds of civil society structures, including
18:43
having been part of social justice organizations, being part of nonprofit infrastructure, et cetera. In terms of participation, this is, again, in our survey, you know, we were seeing that really almost 70% of the people who answered the survey had been to a general assembly. Over 60% had been to a camp itself.
19:03
And people are participating in really concrete ways. So it's not just sort of this online Facebook support sort of narrative. People are sort of showing, at least people participating in this survey, are showing up and providing material support and engaging in kind of a deeper sense in terms of like working groups and so on.
19:20
And the reason why there's more people who attended a general assembly than have been to a camp is because, again, the population includes all of these Facebook groups that represented local occupiers that may not have actually had a physical encampment site. But they did have a general assembly. We also asked folks what types of other types of participation that they were
19:43
engaged in, even outside of sort of camp activities and like direct Occupy activities. And a lot of, again, a lot of people were identifying, signing petitions, you know, having face-to-face discussions about Occupy and so forth. But one thing we also kind of wanted to point to was having organized an event or an action being close to 20% of our surveyed population.
20:05
And, you know, someone was mentioning earlier this being a leaderless, we've actually heard a lot of Occupy folks also say that there was a leaderful movement. And this actually, for us at least, is at least kind of indicating tangible, you know, participation, even in terms of like straight up taking leadership roles over organizing events and that kind of thing.
20:25
We know that there are a lot of other people who are doing interviews in camps and really quite a lot of sort of the rich interview techs for people for whom this is the first social movement they participated in. They have felt and expressed that one of the most kind of emotionally charging things about this
20:41
movement for them has been the capacity to engage in whatever way that they would like to. What does it mean in terms of, this is a discussion that was had earlier today in terms of whether or not there are sort of the most visible leaders. That's not sort of what we're talking about here. We are talking about just kind of different types of engagement. So there are a lot of opportunities. Again, I'm talking about opportunities around Occupy research
21:01
as an agenda, as an open network, as an open shared space for doing research. For us, you know, participation of a wide network of folks, speed, scale, the kind of openness, being able to share data, being able to have that kind of open dialogue, being able to pull that conversation away from sort of just, you know, what have you, traditional kind of actors.
21:21
But there are also a lot of challenges. Not equal, necessarily equal access, accountability, coordination has been a lot of work. Transparency is an issue, and frankly, authority. And again, to be honest, you know, we, there are over, again, there are over 300 folks who are participating in the network.
21:41
We don't know all of those people. And so we've started to try to create mechanisms asking people to self-report more deeply what their agenda is, who they are, where they're coming from. There have been people who have said, okay, well, you know, I know data center, I know they're a social movement ally, so I'm okay with participating. But there have been moments of pushback where people were just feeling like they were
22:00
unclear about what the agenda of different researchers are, as they should be, you know. If you're interested, if you're doing research on Occupy or you're just interested in sort of checking this out, there's different ways. We basically, this is our blog, the first sort of link here. You can follow us on Twitter. There's a mailing list. We'll send this out later. Can you all see that in the back? No? Occupyresearch.net.
22:26
And before I hand it over to Sasha, I just, you know, we're basically going to do a data analysis workshop with the Occupy survey data with folks from the camps at the Allied Media Conference coming up. It's in Detroit, Michigan in the US at the end of June. And, yeah, so thank you.
22:51
So we're just switching over the presentation now. Cool. So I'm going to talk about work that came out of the Occupy Research Network, especially focused
23:02
on the media culture in the Occupy movement, and I'll talk a little bit about what that is. And I'm also going to talk about sort of the broader media ecology in which Occupy is taking place. So, again, my name is Sasha Costanza-Chock, and I'm assistant professor
23:20
of civic media at Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I'm also a co-principal investigator along with Ethan Zuckerman and Mitch Resnick at the Center for Civic Media, which is a research unit within MIT's Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies that explores how participatory media making can be connected to civic engagement and civic action.
23:43
I'm a Berkman Fellow, and I'm a co-founder of Occupy Research. I guess no one has internet access, so those are useless. Whoops. So I'm going to start with a little clip, if it loads, of Talib Kweli, who's a MC best known for taking part with Mos Def and Blackstar.
24:07
I guess it's not going to load, so I'll skip it. There is a secret internet connection up here to this computer, but it doesn't seem to be working too well. So this was a little clip of Talib Kweli using the people's mic, in which he basically just uses the people's mic to talk about
24:23
and encourage occupiers in the second week of Occupy Wall Street to use every media tool that they have at their disposal to spread the word. So what I'm going to do today is talk about some key concepts.
24:41
So the key concepts that I'm working with, so first of all, what do I mean by media ecology? I've been hearing this phrase a number of times today, which is great. I really like that people are thinking beyond specific platforms and moving outside the discourse of, oh, Facebook revolution, oh, Twitter revolution, oh, this platform, that platform.
25:02
It's not that the platforms aren't important, and I really like the way that Zainab was talking about this earlier today, but we need to understand them within the context of the broader media ecology that people inhabit now. So a media ecology, if we want to map it out, we can think about the political economy of the media system, the way that new platforms or old platforms may have different technical affordances.
25:23
We need to think about the levels of digital media literacies, access, and skills that the general population have and also that people who are participating in a movement have. And, of course, we have to think about the legal and normative constraints on speech in a given context. Those things sort of make up what I'm talking about as the media ecology.
25:43
And by social movement media culture, I mean this, the tools, skills, practices, and norms that participants in a movement might be using, not just to create media, not just to document, not only to act as citizen journalists or activist media makers, but also to curate, to circulate, to aggregate, to amplify movement voices across all of these different spaces within the broader media ecology.
26:11
And in other work, I talk about this as being transmedia mobilization. I'm not going to focus on that too much today, but I'm sort of trying to argue that if we want to understand the relationship between social movements and the broader transformed media ecology,
26:24
we should think about the ways in which social movement actors are using every tool that they have access to to generate and circulate messages across platforms so that people have multiple touch points by which they can enter into the narrative of the movement. So this is an image of the media ecology surrounding Occupy. This is work that is largely being done by Pablo
26:49
Rey-Mason, who's a visiting research scientist at MIT's Center for Civic Media, and I've been working with him on this work. So what we're seeing is basically from left to right is time. Each column, these are front pages of newspapers.
27:04
So these are the newspapers of record in the United States, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, et cetera. And what's highlighted in red is the surface area of that newspaper front page on that day, which is devoted to coverage of the Occupy movement. What you see in the bar chart then is the percent of the total newspapers of note front page coverage that's devoted to Occupy.
27:28
And then what you see in the lines in the background more faintly, and I'll zoom into this in a second, is Twitter data, so Occupy-related hashtags being used there.
27:43
So before I jump into that, I'll quickly give a sort of short overview of some of the key media texts that were circulated about Occupy. So of course, this is the famous AdBusters poster. AdBusters is a medium-sized media jamming magazine that's been
28:00
around for over a decade that launched this iconic poster as an invocation for people to experience a Tahrir moment. They talked about being related to the Spanish Indianados movement, and the idea was to take the energy of the global cycle of struggles coming out of the Arab Spring and think about what that would look like in the United States.
28:23
This is September 3rd, a planning session of a small group of people who were thinking about actually doing an occupation of Wall Street on September 17th. And this is a map that they developed for their plan to do so. And on September 7th, they actually did a test run of the occupation, and several people were arrested.
28:44
Totally invisible in, really in any media space, not very visible even in the social media space. But September 10th, Anonymous produces a video, which I don't have time to show you now, but these slides will be online and you can look at them later when you have internet access, calling for people to support people's right to peacefully assemble.
29:02
And the Anonymous support for the September 17th action that comes out a week beforehand really actually is the first time that you get a bump in sort of social media visibility that this is going to be an action that's maybe worth paying attention to. It circulates through alternative media spaces and autonomous networks, as well as to some degree on social media.
29:22
And then, okay, so this also isn't going to load, or it's going to load really, really slowly, but we'll just act it out. So this then is a video of three young white women taking part in an Occupy action and being kettled by New York police with this orange sort of roping material. Raise your hand if you saw this video. Okay, so only a handful of people.
29:43
So then they were kettled and then pepper sprayed, and so I'm police, you know, casually walking up, and then I pepper spray, and then there's screaming and people collapsing in agony, and this video really circulated very widely. And this is the first time that actually, after the Anonymous video, you get a big bump in the social media space.
30:01
The first time that you get mass media coverage is really with the October 1st arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge. So about 700 people get arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge in a large action, and what we can see is that that then translates into the first sort of front page newspaper coverage that you're getting. Well, there's a tiny little story before that here, but the first time that
30:24
you're starting to get significant front page newspaper coverage comes after those 700 arrests. And you can also see, so remember I mentioned that back here you had the Anonymous video, so that's this first sort of bump happening in Twitter. Fast forward to October 15th, right, so global day of action that was called
30:44
for by Occupy as well as the occupation of Times Square in New York City. This is a map of the locations of all of the actions on October 15th, over 1200 actions sort of documented there, and this is an instance of Ushahidi. This is actually on crowdmap.com, which is the hosted platform of the Ushahidi mapping system.
31:04
And of course, that's the highest level of coverage yet for the Occupy movement. So on the 15th, you get almost 10% of the front pages of the major English language newspapers are covering Occupy, and you get a big spike in the Twitters.
31:22
And then the largest spike comes with the actual eviction of Occupy Wall Street on November 15th. You have the highest peak of tweets, and it's interesting here if you look sort of up at the top here, you've got Twitter actually peaking, not surprisingly, as the occupation is actually taking place. And then the next day, you've got the big sort of front page coverage all across the various papers.
31:43
And it continues on like that. So you get additional bumps each time that a major Occupy is evicted. So you've got the eviction of Occupy Los Angeles here, the eviction of Occupy Boston here, and it sort of continues on like that. So this basically lets us look at how media texts flow across these different spaces within the media ecology.
32:04
So I'm going to turn now to talking about media culture. So, occupiers aren't just tweeting, they're not just on Facebook, and they're not only getting coverage in the mass media. They're engaged in a really wide range, a very rich and diverse set of media production practices.
32:23
We talked a little bit about the people's mic. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to load this video. But this video here actually demonstrates the people's mic being used during a jail solidarity action in 1999 during the WTO protests organized by the Global Justice Movement.
32:42
And is everyone familiar with the people's mic? Mic check. Mic check. This is the people's mic. The people's mic. You've probably heard and seen it. It's made famous by Occupy.
33:01
Made famous by Occupy. But it has a much longer history. Okay, thank you. Additionally, a common strategy is media teams and working groups. So these are in the physical locations where those occupiers did have tents set up. Of course, you have an area which is devoted to media and media making.
33:22
And so here's an image from inside the Occupy Boston media tent. This is people sharing different skills and ideas, showing each other how a camera works, talking to each other about different sort of breaking news from within the movement. And I love this over on the left. You can't quite see it, but this is on the wall an explanation of how you use IRC, Internet Relay Chat.
33:42
So Internet Relay Chat is one of the oldest forms of sort of simultaneous real-time communication. It's very low bandwidth, and this little poster says, IRC is a really, really old, old, old style of communication that some hackers and geeks used to use. And so what's interesting is that IRC became much more visible, not in sort of the broader media ecology and not throughout the movement,
34:06
but certainly among people who were working inside the media working groups. People learned about this tool and used it to coordinate in real time across the multiple camp locations of Occupy and provide remote support. These are more media tents from Occupy London and Occupy L.A., so it's a pretty common practice.
34:22
But of course this has its own prehistory, right? So here's the World Social Forum in Brazil in 2009. And it's a sort of, again, so the Independent Media Center in Brazil setting up a physical location where people can come and do skill shares. And below that is the G8 protest in Scotland in 2005 organized by UK Indie Media and others with Reclaim the Media.
34:44
And could you click on the Reclaim the Media one? So it's basically a very similar type of space, but as you can see here, yeah. Oh, I don't know. Anyway, the monitors are a lot bigger, was the only thing I wanted to say.
35:02
So similar types of practices that circulate through movement networks. Live streams. So live streams were widely popularized by the Occupy movement, and Global Revolution live stream was receiving over 80,000 simultaneous views during some of the key sort of moments,
35:20
and that was a really interesting development. The video in the middle is Vlad Teichberg, who's from Glass Speed Collective, one of the founders of Global Revolution TV. And over here we've got a Occupy Streams map, which is created by Charlie Datar, who's a researcher at the Media Lab at MIT. It's built on OpenStreetMap, so basically he's pulling all of, in real time, the existing live streams from the Occupy movement,
35:45
and you could actually click on any of these and it would then open up into a real time live stream. And so a lot of interesting technical innovation around also being able to browse and understand the movement media production practices, but the point that I wanted to sort of give here, whoops, go back one,
36:01
was that there's a whole prehistory of live streaming. So in Wisconsin in March 2011, there's a huge sort of labor struggle and a recall proposal on a governor who is vehemently anti-union, and this is a Kickstarter page of the local live stream trying to get resources to keep going. The Dream Activists did this in 2010 during their sit-in of Senator McCain's office in opposition,
36:23
well, trying to get immigration reform for undocumented students and youth. In 2008, during the Republican National Convention, a citizen media group called The Uptake did live streaming of all the events and did a lot of trainings of people who were in the Twin Cities. And Vlad, I happen to know because I was there working with the Independent Media Center
36:43
and with Witness Video to document police brutality at the RNC 2008, so The Uptake was doing live streaming trainings and Vlad participated in that, got excited about the possibilities of the technology, goes back to New York and starts training people on how to do this. So when Occupy kicks around, there's this skill base. But it goes back even further than that. Over here is Deep Dish TV,
37:03
which in the 1980s was a sort of radical media collective that gathered money to purchase rent time with satellite trucks and rent space on a satellite network in the United States to do live, real-time, nationwide broadcasting of anti-nuclear mobilizations and also of Iraq War 1, so they did live streaming of the Iraq War 1 mobilizations, Bush the senior, the elder.
37:28
And so again, these are long sort of pre-histories and Dee Dee Halleck, who's one of the founders of Deep Dish TV, also went to Seattle and became one of the founders of the Independent Media Center. So these ideas sort of circulate through movement networks is the point.
37:41
Social media is obviously key. I'll give you just a couple examples from, so I mentioned that shared dataset of 13 million tweets that were gathered by Arshif, the critical code collective. They've also been gathering a lot of data on the Arab Spring. But we worked with them to do an Occupy data hackathon, or two of them, coordinated by Google Hangout and shared live notes on the different projects
38:05
and we brainstormed different ideas of how could we visualize these tweets, how could we understand better what types of things are people actually doing as they're producing social media around Occupy. And so we came up with simple visualizations like this one, it's like a free open source version of Trendistic,
38:21
which just shows you different Occupy hashtags and their volume over time. This is new Occupy hashtag users over time, the left one is cumulative and this one is new and those trends just mirror what we saw in the other sort of general volume. So the key events that happen bring lots of new users into the network using the hashtag.
38:43
This is by the team from Utrecht that participated, is Mirko here? Hey Mirko. So Mirko's team produced this beautiful visualization using Gephi of the Occupy related reply networks.
39:01
So basically each color represents a different Occupy and the proximity of the points, so the black points are individual users, the proximity is based on how frequently they're communicating with each other and to make a long story short, because I'm running over on time, what you see is sort of a representation in Twitter space of the actual connectedness of different Occupy locations.
39:24
So I think the purple one, is that Utrecht? That's Amsterdam. So Amsterdam is a little bit off, separated on its own, some of the other local Occupies are more tightly connected. We also looked inside what are people sharing via these tweets, these Occupy hashtags.
39:40
So this is a visualization, if we were live with the net, you could sort of browse and sort by the URLs that people are sending in tweets. What kind of things are they linking to? And so we can actually sort and look over time and volume for when people are sending links to videos, when they're sending links to the live stream, when they're sending links to a donation via WePay.
40:02
So we're doing sort of content categories on the types of links sent around. There's a lot more stuff I could share, this actually isn't from the hackathon, but Gilad Lotan did participate in both. So we're looking at the Twitter networks evolving over time, so they become more complex,
40:22
larger media actors enter into those networks, we could talk more about this later, but I want to kind of move on from all the Twitter visualizations. And we had fun, right? So we also scraped Tumblr for all of the remixes of Pepper Spray Cop, and then we created a giant meta meme Pepper Spray Cop, which is recursive,
40:41
which if you zoom into the image of Pepper Spray Cop, you'll end up looking at more images of Pepper Spray Cop, and you can just kind of keep diving in. So humor is also an important part of the way that social movement media makers create and circulate images from their movement, right? And there's a lot of other stuff that happened, right? Occupy Design, Occupy Hackathons to create apps, this is the I'm being arrested alert app,
41:03
there's a lot of different kinds of practices, and we could sort of sit here all evening, but I want to move on and out of this space. So how do we know which ones are important? So all this stuff is going on, okay great, so you can find some anecdotes and examples. Well, in the Occupy Research orgs survey that Chris talked about the whole process of how we created that,
41:23
and there's some credits over there on the left in terms of who was involved in the key working group, but one of the things we asked about, in addition to the demographic information and other forms of participation, we asked some stuff about media making. So we've got 20% almost of people said that they wrote a blog post about Occupy,
41:41
and about 8% of them made a video about Occupy. Now those numbers might seem really small, but they actually mirror what we find in the general population. So if you look at the Pew Internet in American Life stats on the types of media making practices that people do online, it looks a lot like that.
42:01
And then you can't really see this, it's fuzzy, we need to make a nice visualization, sorry, but we also asked, so these are different sources of media that people used, and the columns are sort of frequency of use. So over here, this column is like in the last 24 hours, and then it goes on to the past week, past month, more than a month ago, I never did it.
42:24
And so we have some interesting data points around the types of media and how important they were to different people who were part of the Occupy movement. What's interesting here is more than half of the people in our survey said that they never used Twitter. But the majority were on Facebook within the last 24 hours.
42:40
There's that 7% using IRC. There's 288 people out of our survey and 3,000 who never had used IRC, but those 288, if we start running the crosstabs, I think we're going to find that they were involved in media working groups, that kind of stuff. And so, I don't know, what else is interesting here? Traditional media, not playing a huge role.
43:03
So local radio, local television, you know, two-thirds of people got some information from it at some point in their movement participation time, but really it's not super important. And actually the live-streaming video site is beating out a number of the other forms of traditional broadcast media in terms of who's using it in the past 24 hours.
43:23
So that's interesting. And almost half of the people are using websites of the Occupy movement itself for information. So if we step back from Occupy, right, what I'm saying is that I think that we could look at all social movements and sort of do this type of work and try and do some type of analysis
43:41
around what is the media culture of different social movements. And there are different characteristics that different social media cultures might have. We want to think about, is it transparent? What are the mechanisms for internal and external transparency when you're deciding what media gets amplified more? What's the role of experts? So there are these people who are sort of moving through movement spaces
44:02
who might have prior knowledge, who bring it in. Are they participating in a movement? Are they accountable? What are the mechanisms for accountability? Again, amplification, and I have some interesting examples here. So specifically in a movement like Chris talked about, the racial composition of the Occupy movement,
44:22
it's like, you know, majority whites, although different Occupys, take different steps to try and include the voices of people of color. But what are the concrete steps? So in Occupy, you have projects like Occupy the Hood, which is a concrete specific attempt to go out and work in low-income communities and communities of color to connect with what's happening in Occupy.
44:42
You have people of color working groups form in a lot of local Occupys. You have procedural innovations like Progressive Stack. So Stack is a list of people who are going to speak at a General Assembly, and Progressive Stack says, okay, we're going to prioritize the voices of women and people of color and trans folks, and they get to jump to the front of the line when we're having a General Assembly.
45:01
So there's lots of different strategies that movements might adopt to try and amplify the voices of those who are usually excluded. What are the norms around messaging? Do people just speak for themselves, or is everyone expected to stay on message? In Occupy, there were a lot of trainings about how to speak to the media, not so much about what message to say to the media, but this is how you create your own sound bite,
45:22
and that was an interesting sort of relatively open type of innovation. Well, standing is just a media studies term for when you actually go and measure who did get to speak to the media. So you could look and see who got quoted, who got cited, and we're working on some tools at the Center for Civic Media to use natural language processing to automate the extraction
45:40
of counts of standing in mass media by movement actors. And open and closed. So what are the dynamics within a movement space in a social movement media culture that lean towards open and lean towards closed? So in Occupy, you've got all these open spaces, working groups that anyone can participate in, different tools and platforms that are set up
46:02
where people can participate, but you've also got closed logics like, oh, the police raided us, let's pack up the media camp and let's move it to a secret hidden location. So by open and closed, it's not only a normative value judgment around, oh, open's always better, closed is always good. Sometimes there are reasons why you need to close down a particular communication process at a particular moment in time.
46:21
So this is sort of privacy and surveillance concerns. But the question is, how is the movement communication space characterized along these axes? That's pretty much what I've got. So we need to use diverse methods. We need to work within a framework of research justice, as Chris articulated, to try and figure out what are the questions the movement actors want to know and how do we do that together.
46:41
There's a rapidly changing media ecology in the process, and media movement texts move across them and between them, using rich and complex media cultures that include both sort of deep experience and knowledge with actors coming from other movements to share that, as well as new people coming in and new experiences generating new ideas, processes, tools,
47:02
and shaped by both open and closed logics of participation. So that's that. We have some time for questions. Thank you very much. Thank you. We have time for questions. Are there any questions?
47:27
Oh, yeah. Sorry. Given that there's intelligence organizations
47:40
that would really like to use this information for their purposes against the movement, do you come across things that you've gathered that you thought it would make more sense to give it directly back to the communities rather than making it transparent, say, on a website so everyone can use it? And how do you make those distinctions?
48:02
Like, what's going to be good to be transparent and what's going to be good within the community? You want to talk about that? Sure. I can talk about it in the context of the data center because this is something that actually for us comes up a lot. Occupy Research is a challenge for us in the sense that we actually design that survey
48:20
in order to not capture data that would be sensitive or reveal the identity of particular individuals. But, in fact, a lot of the communities that we work with, many are undocumented. Many have really, really kind of critical vulnerabilities. So there are instances, many instances, in fact I would say the majority of the time, where we're being open with our process but the data is protected in order to protect communities.
48:42
So it is absolutely a critical issue. I mean, that's not the only reason either. A lot of times organizations that we're working with have specific corporate targets and that is something that needs to remain, to remain secret in order to protect their interests as well. With the orgs dataset specifically, for example, there was no personally identifying information
49:01
but a lot of people in the last question, which was open-ended, put these big thank yous and then like their name and, you know, this is great, contact me, you know, when it's ready. And so before we released the dataset, we cleaned all of that, deleted all of that information so that's not being put out as one example.
49:21
Here's another question. So I'm back here. So this was quite interesting how the information flows work through different ecologies. Can you see me now? So I wanted to ask about how it goes from social media to mainstream media to back in this particular case
49:42
because I've seen this in the Arab Spring, Iraq Rising's research a lot, is that there's usually some sort of spectacle that gets mainstream media interested and then people turn to their social networks sometimes to get more information. The anonymous video seems to have been bit of a blip,
50:01
the police brutality. So could you talk a little bit about those kinds of the ecology part? Yeah, sure. I mean, you've done really great work on this and I think that in a way there's a lot of very similar processes happening here. So the mass media organizations over the last few years have definitely transformed the way that they think
50:21
about the social media space, whereas there was a moment at the turn of the century where it was like, let's ignore this social media space. So at the time it was networks like Indymedia existed but it wasn't sort of that visible. Then there was this period of time when there was this sort of battle lines were drawn between the traditional journalists
50:40
and the citizen journalists. And I think that by now in 2012 the space has really transformed a lot so that many of the mass media, quote unquote, organizations, of course they're constantly now, they have whole teams of people devoted to sorting and sifting through what's happening on social media spaces. Individual journalists, editors, some newsrooms actually have a team,
51:01
others it's more distributed. But the idea is that you're also constantly looking and curating what's happening in the social media space and then putting that back out, amplifying it through television if you're a broadcast outlet. And then of course by doing that you're reaching a whole new set of people who are gonna take that and manipulate it back through their social media networks
51:21
both by reposting stuff that's been put on the site of a mass media organization or just by sort of writing or tweeting about it. So it really is, yeah as you're saying it's sort of a complicated process of remediation that has opened up a lot I think recently and is now a sort of regular part of the way that the process works.
51:42
I'm not sure if that. Here comes another question. Hi. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about bias. I noticed in the complex map looking at Wall Street Journal, New York Times and the other newspapers of record that there's a distinct difference between different papers.
52:00
And I imagine that that's probably true across different media sources. So have you done any research on that and what does it look like? And the last question is are you feeding it back into the communities in terms of fact checking and media correction? Yeah, absolutely. So I mean of course what the visualization
52:21
that we just showed is really just looking at surface area of coverage. This is something that media studies folks and comm scholars have done for a long time but there's a great work by Victor San Pedro from Spain looking at sort of the Spanish draft movement in the 80s where he had a team of graduate students looking at all the front pages
52:41
of the Spanish newspapers. This is in Spain, not Spanish language in the US. Sort of taking rulers and measuring the proportion of the surface area that's covered and then calculating it. But it would take them months and months with this big team. So this tool that we're developing now which is called Page One X. We actually got a Google Summer of Code person to work on it with us this summer.
53:01
We're taking it from this handcrafted thing that Pablo's been doing where he's, it's just one person pointing and clicking to a platform based tool that anybody could use to follow a particular story. And it's sort of, we have this interface where it'll give you the different front page of a newspaper and then you say, does this have my story, the one I'm following,
53:20
yes or no? And if yes, then you highlight the area. Of course that's just area, it's not looking at framing and bias. The same interface design, we're also working sort of the next step beyond that would be to allow people to do sort of within a particular sentence, also highlight sentences, pull out particular frames, do frame coding.
53:41
We're kind of inspired by this work by Mira Marks-Fery and a bunch of other scholars that have a book called Shaping Abortion Discourse where they really look at sort of looking inside different mass media outlets and creating a whole sort of coding book around framing. And again, it took them five years and an army of graduate students, but they generate these really amazing charts
54:02
of the bias around abortion debates in Germany and the United States and which movement actors get to speak. And we're trying to build on some of that work and create a new set of web-based tools that'll let people do that type of process in a shared sort of open network. So right now, we haven't done that classic sort of frame analysis within the coverage,
54:21
but of course it's there and we could do quantitative analysis on it later. Okay, we have one last question for now. Hi, Mike, good afternoon. I really enjoy your speech and I think it's one of the best I've seen today. And I would like to hear what's your take
54:41
on the word, the label, expert, because it's something I never really believed in. Being an expert doesn't really tell me much apart from the label itself. So I think every expert has an ideology, so I would like to know what you think about this label anyway. Cheers. Now why don't you talk about it?
55:01
So I'll start and then I think since you kind of were talking about in the context of occupying media and media space. So in the context of the work that we do where we're working with communities constantly to challenge the label of expert, it's really important for us to disrupt the definition of expertise as coming from specific sites.
55:22
In the context of research, it usually is from the academy and as we're moving into communities, many communities who've had really bad experiences again with research, it's not just that. It's also kind of the internalized process of not seeing your knowledge as being also legitimate knowledge and seeing your expertise as being expertise. So we try to sort of take the concept of expertise
55:41
and put it on the table as something to be challenged and effectively reshaped and reconfigured and something that is judged by the communities themselves. Maybe in the context of... Yeah, I mean I don't have much to add to that. You know, research justice is the framework that we're working within. It's about legitimating forms of knowledge that aren't usually seen as legitimate.
56:01
It's about challenging the hegemony of the academy and to some degree corporate researchers over what's considered real knowledge. And so if you mean why did I use the term expert then yeah, I should change it, thanks. So thank you all. Thank you very much, Christine and Sascha.
56:23
Thank you.