#OccupyMyHomeworkAssignment

Well, I think I may have taken my Social Media Lab a little too far. I have recently been checking my RSS feeds and found an article on Wednesday about 80 people arrested in New York. I wasn’t immediately shocked until I noticed that the arrests were from an ongoing protest in New York, for at that time what was in its eleventh day. I would thought I would have heard something about it before, I don’t watch the T.V. but I had just started watching news feeds online pretty regularly for a class assignment and had not seen anything before this and much about it right away.

So I goggled, found out that this movement was based in Social Media, having no ability to resist, I started to Facebook and tried to find out as much about this stuff as possible. Honestly I would have a choice, my uncle started posted articles he found, so did my aunt and one of my friends.I had really only recently started Facebooking regularly, so I thought this would be a good exercise. And the more I learned about what was happening, and the more I realized the mainstream media’s attempt to dismay the movement. Then I realized something; this social media stuff is ridiculously powerful!

In seconds I was jumping back and forth from Facebook to blogs, to YouTube to international news sources. I watched police corral young woman up against a wall with plastic fencing, then an officer walked up, sprayed them in the face with pepper spray. I watched a cop grab a cameraman by the neck and smash his head into a parked car. I watched a police officer grab a girl and push her to the ground, and drag her under the fence of the makeshift pin while kicking and screaming. I was shocked, but not as shocked as to learn that there was little mainstream media coverage. Here is the one piece of scathing mainstream media coverage.

I started to “join” and “like” the occupy movement, I found articles stating the police covering up the brutality. I watched the support from people like Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon. Then on Saturday I found out the police arrested 400 people on the Brooklyn Bridge. I checked it out, watch some YouTubes then put my ear to the ground for the media’s response. As what was predicted they spun it into the movement “occupying the bridge” and attacked the perceived ambiguity of the movement.

By the time Fox New launched their attacks on the movement, It was too late to sway me, I had already seen, the cops tell the protesters to stay off the road, holding them at the bridge, allowing people to cross on the walkway. I also saw that once the lane the cops closed was clear the cops turned their backs to the protesters and walked toward the middle of the bridge in the road ahead of the protesters. Then they met other officers from the other side of the bridge and brought out their nets. It was like fishing in a bath tub. The officers held traffic for 4 hours to arrest protesters and give them what equates to a parking ticket. After awhile the blue shirt officers in the back started to let people leave, but later the white shirt officers came to stop them from letting people go. 

I was astounded; I watched real time events unedited, I was allowed to formulate my own judgment based on unambiguous raw video. All sent to me through user driven content surpassing the mainstream media that apparently does not want the whole story to be told.

I think it’s safe to say that I learned something from my assignment, both about the function of social media, its influence and raw power. It really can be overpowering.