Forum Post: The Medium is the Movement

|| The community here at OccupyWallSt.org felt like a space of resonance regarding the topic, so I just wanted to share a proposal I wrote in April 2013 and revised a little that October. It's a reflection on how the role of social media can be innovated in "popular defense" or "revolutionary resistance" and is meant to stimulate imagined tactical-possibilities more than anything. I assumed it wouldn't hurt to share here if anybody ever felt like bouncing their own related ideas off it:

|| It's titled "Medium as Movement: Cultivating the Role of Social Media in Civil Protest" and a direct link in the absence of any way to attach a PDF file follows here:

https://growveinitiative.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/mediumasmovement.pdf

|| Aim:

Highlighting the role social media technologies have played in contemporary protest movements, this piece offers a proposal on where the role can be cultivated from here. With an eye toward how the "Arab Spring" and "Occupy" protests have unfolded, I paint a narrative of social media's successes/shortcomings in enabling these protest movements to promote democratic practice and effective social change. By keeping these measures of democratic practice and effective social change in mind, my proposal emerges as one pushing for the communal use/broadcast of live streaming and Voice over IP in, and across, physical spaces of protest.

More than simply participating in the broadcast of these technologies from our computers or phones, this available tactic suggests we make visible to the rest of our community the active protests of other communities by "broadcast demonstrations" from large screens held in spaces such as downtown parks and recreation areas. The hope is for maximized attention of bystanders, cross-local coordination between communities, and visible, mutual accountability between police authorities and protestors in action.

|| Unfiltered criticism and responses are far more than encouraged.