Remembering the Occupy Movement

Liam Rafferty - 1509255

Personal Perspective on the Occupy Movement

This creative memory text is constructed out of my impression of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and the wider ‘Occupy’ movement. In considering the importance of mediation to these events for creating awareness of their existence while fostering participation and public discourse, the question of “how will we be remembered?” implies an acknowledgement of the way events are historically constructed through mediated memory. The concepts of ‘collective’ and ‘connective’ memory are relevant to the question at the heart of my creative text, while the latter memory form was interestingly prevalent in image sourcing for its production.

My memory of the Occupy movement consisted of a great variety of peoples with different reasons for participating. Common queries such as “what are they protesting for?” were based in assumptions of organisation across the movement, which was not the reality. My impression of this ‘mixed movement’ is represented by the three initial text-image combinations following the header; a child advocating the right to a secure up-bringing; Oakland youths whose collective action surges into violence; and Veterans against the Iraq war adding to the value of the movement, their own place as a marginalised group. A significant trend of the media discourse on the Occupy movement was to question the presence of ‘class-warfare’ in these events. My view of the movement was that it relied upon a conglomeration of those portraying a sense of economic and social injustice in many forms, yet who did not belong to a single class in particular, hence these initial images of varying individuals, groups, actions and agendas contrast to convey what I recall as a sense of broad cohesiveness around a central call to action.

The second part of my creative text represents the Occupy movement’s creators of mediated memory; side walk spectators, scrutinised Wall Street business-people, the Police and journalists. In a similar way to the first part, my impression of the Occupy movement was informed by an array of differing personal and media perspectives which is conveyed by contrast between these agents of memory and documentation. Although the types of people represented here did not directly participate in the movement, they played an important role in remembering it, and furthermore in mediating these memories; through images, video capture, and by communication through a range of information channels. This is an important role, with the legitimacy of any political movement being reliant on its public representation. ‘How’ the occupiers in the first part of my creative text are remembered, is dependent on the nature of memory in the digital age and what mediating roles the figures of this second part had to play.

The Occupy movement has taken place in an era where the quickened, networked, and liberalised manner by which information travels demands reconsideration of the centrality of ‘collective memory’ in relation to media. Van Dijck claims that this memory form is generally associated with mass-media and stems heavily from anthropocentric understandings of collectiveness and commonality (402-403). In these terms, collective memory has little consideration for the way that technical workings of our dominant information network, the internet, can affect the presentation of digital memory alongside its cultural formation. In recognition of this, Hoskins introduces the term ‘connective’ memory to describe how the ways that we remember through media are increasingly a result of socio-technical phenomena of the network society, while pointing to widespread internet access as well as the instantaneity and heightened agency of the individual’s digital communication as contributing to the emergence of connective memory (24). In light of this concept, answers to the question at the centre of my creative text might be found in how the movement was mediated, and digital memory created from it.

The images of camera wielding spectators and journalists found in the creative text mark a significant part of my personal memory of the Occupy movement. The use of handheld recording and image capturing devices proved crucial for documenting events that legitimised some of the more democratic-reformist agendas of the movement. Footage of police occasionally using excessive force and violating individuals’ rights to peaceful assembly were significant to my mediated experience, and the distribution of media showing such abuse explains in itself why some authorities attempted to restrict camera use in and around the international sites of occupation. Importantly these images, videos and stories were not solely produced by formal media figures. While journalists were heavily involved, much of the visual media of the Occupy movement came from participants and spectators, with the concept of the ‘citizen-journalist’ having relevance here. Essentially, connective memory of the Occupy movement is enabled by two phenomena; a decentralised, liberalised multiplicity of information nodes represented by the individuals pictured within the second part of my creative text; and the technical workings of internet tools that can group or make connections between the media content of these individuals.

As an example, expressions of connective memory were visible in my search for suitable images of the Occupy movement. Google searches using key phrases like “policemen at OWS” returned access to hundreds of images within my one monitor screen, from which I could gather an overall impression of police presence on Wall Street. A collage of culturally/politically informed media was presented and constructed by the unseen algorithm of the Google search engine.

Works Cited

Hoskins, A. “Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn.” Parallax 17.4 (2011): 19–31. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 15 Sep. 2012.

van Dijck, J. “Flickr and the Culture of Connectivity: Sharing Views, Experiences, Memories.” Memory Studies 4.4 (2011): 401-415. SAGE Journals. Web. 15 Sep. 2012.