Media Challenging Status Quo: Social media and the Occupy movement

Digital media and especially so-called ‘social media’ have on the one hand been ascribed the power to change societies and empower democratic movements following the thoughts of e.g. Rheingold (2004), recently fueled by the democratic uprising in Arabic countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Iran and Libya creating headlines like “the Facebook revolution”. On the other hand, several scholars argue that it is naive to believe that social media in themselves create change: they may at the best facilitate already existing social and political movements (Downing 2008, Christakis & Fowler 2010). Skeptical internet sociologists such as Morozov (2011) point out that the same media which was used e.g. to mobilize the ‘Twitter revolution’ in Iran in 2009 also was used by the regime to infiltrate and strike down the democratic movement.
Following such position statements, international media and communication research is currently engaging in a longer and deeper process of examining and assessing the cultural consequences of networked communication. One present challenge is to understand digital media and networked communication at the intersection of established and countercultural, utopian and dystopian trends in contemporary culture (Turner 2006). On that note, this paper examines the Occupy Wall Street-movement as an example on how social media may rock the status quo of today’s global power structures putting to use its democratic potential and its modes of communication through network structures and thus – along with a variety of both historical and socio-political conditions (Zizek 2011) – both enabling and shaping the protests against the financial powers of the world and their role in the global financial crisis.

References:
Christakis, N. & J. Fowler (2010): Connected. The amazing power of social network and how they shape our lives, New York, Boston and London: Backbay Books/Little, Brown and Company
Downing, J. (2008). ”Social Movement Theories and Alternative Media: An Evaluation and Critique”, in: ICA: Communication, Culture & Critique 1
Morozov, J. (2011). The Net Delusion, New York: Perseus Books Group
Rheingold, H. (2004). Smart Mobs. The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge MA: Basic Books
Turner, F. (2006): From counterculture to cyberculture, University of Chicago Press.
Zizek, S. (2011): “Dagen efter oprøret [The day after the riot]”, Dagbladet Information 26.10.12