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Hypermedia space in the Occupy movement: A sociological analysis of new media, its uses, and
its implications for the news industry
“Crowd chanting „media stay‟.”
On December 4th, 2011, an individual tweeted this update as police asked reporters to
move away from the front lines of a standoff with Occupy DC protesters camped in a public
square (twitter.com/#!/search/OccupyDC 2011)1. This single act distils some of the most
significant current questions about media, technology, and society into less than a few seconds
and 140 characters. Perhaps the most central and contentious question is whether new media will
render established media industries obsolete, ushering in a more democratic media, or instead
will only be taken over by existing power structures.
The Occupy movement that swept across the US and the world in the latter part of 2011
was born with a Twitter presence. The social networking website allows users to post and receive
“tweets” of 140 characters or less from a variety of devices including computers and mobile
phones. Mobile devices, live online video streams, and websites like YouTube and Twitter have
been extremely important in coverage of the Occupy movement, making the communication
surrounding it a prime example of what Kraidy and Mourad (2010) call “hypermedia space”.
Yet even as people use technology to bypass traditional media channels, protesters and citizen
journalists alike acknowledge the established news media‟s significance. Sweeping claims that
new media will either disintegrate existing media industry structure or be tamed by it are
necessarily complicated when a tweet comes to the defence of television camera crews, revealing
the need for a new kind of discourse. Such a discourse must “explicate and theorize the ways in
which a variety of „new‟ and „old‟ media connect to each other, rather than celebrating the rise of
new media or lamenting the decline of the old” (Kraidy & Mourad 2010, p. 13). This discourse
finds a firm basis in sociology. Taking the Occupy movement as a case study, this paper assesses
the relationship between new and established media through the application of a sociological
model proposed by Croteau and Hoynes (1997). Viewed from this perspective, the use of media
As social media is an emerging field, there are currently no published standards for citation.
Furthermore, tweets and video streams quoted in this paper may no longer be accessible due to the
fact that these media are naturally live and are not automatically archived or stored. The author
recommends to any researching in this area that they self-archive all data as it may be difficult to
reference later. Some citations in this paper are based on author observation of media that can no
longer be accessed. In these cases, as much reference information as possible has been given.
1

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in the Occupy movement reveals the constructive potential of Kraidy and Mourad‟s view of
hypermedia space as the integration of new and old media structures, as opposed to the battling
theories in which one must dominate the other. Furthermore, application of the sociological
model demonstrates both the usefulness of such a model, and the updates and improvements that
can be made to it.
A sociological approach: Balancing technological determinism with social shaping
The sociological framework modelled by Croteau and Hoynes (1997) integrates and
balances the conflicting theories that gave rise to the dichotomous debate criticised by Kraidy
and Mourad. Present questions of whether professional news and journalism will become
obsolete at the hands of democratised new media or co-opt its potential echoes the decades-old
core debate between technological determinism and social shaping theories. Technological
determinism, espoused by scholars such as Marshall MacLuhan and Nicholas Negroponte,
assumes that technology is a fairly autonomous force that inevitably impacts society. Both
MacLuhan and Negroponte have provided predictions about the way new media technologies
will radically alter or even eradicate existing social structures. For instance, MacLuhan
envisioned electronic media leading to “tribal-like participation in the „global village‟” as a
direct result of its “connecting and unifying characteristics” (cited in Lister et al. 2008, p. 82).
Likewise Negroponte predicted the obsolescence of nation-states, cities, and even retirement and
alarm clocks (1998). Today, predictions include the democratisation of media and empowerment
of the public on the scale of revolution; for instance, an article in The New Leader states that
Twitter has dealt a blow to Iran‟s government and promoted democracy (“Iran‟s Twitter
Revolution” 2009). Similar rhetoric abounds among many who support the citizen journalists of
the Occupy movement, and will be discussed further on.
Social shaping theorists, however, directly challenge the idea that technology can change
society at all. MacLuhan‟s contemporary Williams asserts that social needs, groups, and power
relations determine the technologies that are created, the ways in which they are used, and who
uses them (cited in Lister et al. 2008, p. 86). Winston (1998) takes a similar approach, arguing
further that while technologies and their uses arise from social circumstances, social institutions
counteract the potential they may have to enable change. Discourse about a “digital divide”
reveals how existing economic and social inequality is only widened by the poor‟s lack of access
to new technology (Murthy 2011). Technology, according to these thinkers, only reinforces the

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status quo that gave rise to it. In the case of Twitter and citizen journalism, Murthy writes that
while Twitter has to a degree enabled citizen journalism, citizen journalists and their work are
quickly subsumed by the traditional mass media and thus not truly empowered by new
technology. Rather than becoming known in their own right, citizen journalists simply provide
information and disappear when this information makes its way into the established media
channels (Murthy 2011, p. 12).
Croteau and Hoynes, however, provide a framework that balances both technological
determinism and social shaping by recognising the agency of both technology and of people.
Their model goes beyond debating whether technology influences society or vise versa,
integrating both viewpoints to portray a network of mutual influences. It is this mutuality that
allows for a discussion of new media more cognizant of the complex realities reflected in cases
like the Occupy movement.
Croteau and Hoynes’ sociological model

(Croteau and Hoynes 1997, p. 25, Simplified Model of Media and the Social World, Exhibit 1.5)

The grey-shaded portion of the model represents the social world, in which technology,
the media industry, media messages, and media audiences are all immersed and in which they all
participate. Arrows represent potential relationships, and it is worth noting that all arrows denote
two-way relationships. In the case of the Occupy movement, the social world consists of the
people and actions of the movement and the larger US social context (including events like the
economic recession).
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The fundamental assumption behind this approach reveals its grounding in social shaping
theory: “we cannot understand the media without looking at them as one aspect of a larger social
world” (Croteau & Hoynes 1997, p. 24). However, in a revision of adamant social shaping
theory‟s claim of that technology causes no changes at all (Livingstone 2002, p. 3), the model
does recognise technology as an actor, incorporating some of the important contributions of
thinkers like MacLuhan. In the current study, technology is particularly important as the toolset
for creating and accessing hypermedia space.
It is worth quoting Kraidy and Mourad‟s description of hypermedia space in full: “the
emergent global media environment is best understood as a transnational „hypermedia space‟ in
which so-called „old‟ media like television and newspaper join emergent media like mobile
devices, social media, video on the Internet, and others to create a communication space the
social and political implications of which we are only beginning to discern” (2010, p. 1). The
Occupy movement provides many examples of this, the quote that starts this paper being one of
the most compelling. An individual at a protest tweeted from a mobile device to share online that
protesters did not want the police to force mainstream media‟s video cameras to move. In this
single instance, the different media of human voices, television cameras, mobile Internet devices,
and social networking all interacted to form a hypermedia chain that both created and told a
story. This story would later be told through the Internet, television, and print media alike.
Kraidy and Mourad‟s ideas about creating a communicative “space” can build upon, or
perhaps update, an interesting feature of the Croteau and Hoynes model: its separation of
messages from media industry, technology, and audiences. This stands in contrast to
MacLuhan‟s commonly quoted statement that “the medium is the message” (cited in Lister et al.
2008, p. 76). Rather, the media create a space for messages, and it is this space rather than the
technology alone that is particularly influential. As the model acknowledges, while media
industries along with individuals construct and distribute messages, these messages then enter
the social world to be shared, interpreted, absorbed, critiqued, etc., by others. In hypermedia
space this happens more rapidly than ever before, and distance has become largely irrelevant.
The author was able to watch Occupy DC‟s December 4th protests live from several thousand
miles away, view the comments given by people around the world in real time, and
simultaneously browse news coverage about recent events and background information related to
the movement. These various media are all copresent in the communicative realm of hypermedia

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space, and often linked to one another through hypertext. Thus, though Croteau and Hoynes‟
model largely pre-dates the rise of social networking and the idea of “hypermedia space”, this
concept is useful in understanding how messages can exist, change form, and spread when they
are no longer tied to the medium in which they originate.
Sociological model of the Occupy movement
This analysis of the Occupy movement begins with a description of the social world,
followed by technology, as it has perhaps seen the most dramatic changes in recent time. The
categories of audience and media industries are arguably no longer as clearly defined as they
were even several years ago; therefore, audiences are instead considered “users” categorised on
the basis of how they use new media and the type of media discourse their messages express.
Media industries are then considered as they relate to these new users, while the final portion of
the paper addresses an emerging vision of the media as an integrative network of industries and
new media users.
The Social World
The Occupy movement emerged in a context of severe economic recession and perceived
injustice. Beginning in 2008, the mainstream media revealed scandals and irresponsible policies
of the banks, developers, and mortgage lenders behind the economic crisis that cost many people
their homes, and the repercussions and legal proceedings are still ongoing at the time of writing
(“Financial Crisis” 2011, Goodman & Morgensen 2008, Story 2008, Streitfield & Morgensen
2008). Hence the general focus of the Occupy movement is the economic inequality that has
become more obvious in the recent years of economic crisis, and much of the anger among
Occupiers is directed at banks and lenders who have not been prosecuted or punished- indeed,
many CEOs have continued receiving large bonuses (Eisinger 2011, Story & Morgensen 2011,
Story 2008). The wealthiest members of society have come under intense criticism from much of
the public, particularly with the slogan “We are the 99%”. The phrase acknowledges the
disproportionate economic and social power held by the top 1% of earners, although some
wealthy Americans have joined in with a rallying cry of “We are the 1%. We stand with the
99%”. Pictures on their Tumblr website show wealthy people declaring their solidarity, many
even saying that their taxes are unfairly low (westandwiththe99percent.tumblr.com). Occupy
protests are based in urban tent encampments, typically in locations near centres of financial or

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political power like banks. While the movement has been largely peaceful, arrests and demands
from cities and police to relocate encampments have been far from uncommon
Additionally, 2010 and 2011 were years of worldwide unrest as protests in Egypt and
Libya turned into revolutions and are still ongoing in Syria (topics.nytimes.com 2012a, 2012b,
2012c). Youth with access to mobile technology and social media were particularly influential in
these movements.
Technology
Today‟s social world is permeated with and connected by technology, and especially by
mobile technology and the Internet. Some of the most significant characteristics of new media
technologies, especially for their uses related to the Occupy movement, are interactivity,
mobility, instantaneousness, and the capacity for social networking. Additionally, a term that can
be used to describe hypermedia space in particular is co-presence, referring to the presence of
multiple kinds of media text in one communicative space (Bentivegna 2002, p. 6). This is made
possible by digitalisation, which has provided a common language in which multiple devices can
share media of multiple forms (video, audio, text, etc). Hypermedia space results from this
ability of multiple media channels to form communicative chains, linking “once-discrete media
… into a single seamless web of digital-electronic-telecommunications” (Deibert cited in Kaidy
& Maroud 2010, p. 2).
In the Occupy movement, mobile technology has been particularly important as people
use their mobile devices to tweet, stream live video, or take and instantly share pictures.
Ustream, an online network of live streaming channels, lists 198 streams from US Occupy
camps- with many additional international streams (ustream.tv/occupytogether). A link below the
video channels allows viewers to tweet them, sending links to the video into their Twitter feed.
In an example of this “seamless web”, one comment posted on the OccupyDC Ustream channel
chat feed on 3rd January 2012 declares, “I saw posts about this channel on Twitter, Facebook,
Myspace, and AIM! Nuts!”( www.ustream.tv/channel/somd-at-occupydc). Through the Internet
and social networking, one person with a mobile device can reach thousands of people
worldwide with instant live information. When Time Video covered the work of citizen journalist
Tim Pool, his Ustream channel was drawing over 6,000 viewers (“Occupy Wall Street‟s Live
Streamer Tim Pool” 17 Nov. 2011), and Captain (2011) reports that during a raid of Occupy
Wall Street‟s Zucotti Park camp he had over 20,000 simultaneous viewers.

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As Tim Pool tells Time Video, the interactivity of new media is one of its most important
features. Not only can a citizen journalist broadcast a video stream to thousands of online
viewers, but viewers can post comments live. Pool says, “One of the great things about the
Ustream is that I have a chat feed on my phone, and people can ask questions and I can respond,
or people can ask me to do something and I can do it” (“Occupy Wall Street‟s live streamer”
2011). His viewers even compare the interactive nature of watching Pool‟s live stream to a video
game (Anderson 2011). Such interactivity has long been an object of attention for new media
theorists. Sparks contrasts “dialogic” Internet communication to “monologic” mass media,
stating that the former “permits the possibility of interactivity to a much greater extent than do
the existing media” by virtue of its development as a means for point-to-point communication.
For many new media scholars, this interactivity is conducive to a more democratic media and a
more active public sphere cite from Red Book).
Technology thus seems to have given the public- at least the members who can afford
digital and electronic communication technology- an ability to broadcast news that is comparable
to well-established mass media organisations. Many online user comments compare the amateur
coverage done with handheld mobile devices favourably to the television coverage created by
mass media companies‟ expensive equipment. One early December comment on the YouTube
channel belonging to ajm72222, a live streamer from McPerson Square in DC, reads, “The few
seconds on CNN made me laugh at the pathetic job a multimillion dollar company can do” (cited
in Copeland 2011, p. 1). Similar discourse is common, with the viewers of live streams
comparing the work of a single person with a handheld camera to news groups with scrambling
production crews and large setups. In his article about Tim Pool and business partner Henry
Ferry, Captain proclaims, “With little more than mobile phones they‟ve offered a perspective
that the mainstream media can‟t match” (Captain 2011).
Mainstream media seems to have followed public lead in its adoption of new media
technologies. Twitter feeds related to the Occupy movement feature tweets from newspapers,
television networks, and individual journalists who tweet live as they cover their stories, which
are often re-tweeted and shared by other Twitter users. Andy Carvin from National Public Radio
(NPR) says he sees Twitter as an “open source newsroom” when he is in the field, relying on the
interactivity and social networking functions of the Internet and mobile technology to get
2

Abandoned 2nd December; Broadcasting resumed via AJwatchDC on Ustream.

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information from his Twitter followers (Sonderman 2012). Some news organizations have
started their own live streams, although interestingly, many, including Al Jazeera English, have
also used Pool‟s footage as well (Captain 2011). The re-broadcasting of Pool‟s live stream by
mainstream television news exemplifies the integration of new and old media that Kraidy and
Mourad call “hypermedia space”, and it is made possible by mobile digital technology, wireless
Internet, and social networking.
To assume that technology alone is responsible for changes in the media, however, is to
fall into technological determinism. As Croteau and Hoynes point out in contrast to more
deterministic claims, new technologies do not determine their own uses; they rather form a
“structural constraint” that can both “enable and limit human action” (1997, p. 263). In fact,
when Twitter was first launched, its potential role as a news source was not widely considered.
In 2007, New Media Age addressed Twitter it as nothing more than a medium for mundane
tidbits and social communication (Butcher 2007). Thus, as Croteau and Hoynes assert, a
technology‟s impact significantly depends on how audiences and industries choose to use it, and
this in turn depends on the needs and ideas present in the social world.
No longer just audiences: Media users and the messages they create
Croteau and Hoynes describe two kinds of media user: the media industries who make
messages, and the audiences who interpret them. This limited acknowledgement of audience
agency is now outdated. The active role people play in today‟s highly interactive communication
sphere has caused many to feel that the lines between those who create media and those who
consume it have been significantly blurred (Fancher 2009, Kraidy & Mourad 2010, Stelter 2011).
The present document therefore addresses “users” related to the Occupy movement, grouped
according to the kind of discourse about new media they seem to demonstrate or espouse. This
classification therefore addresses messages as well.
One major user group of hypermedia space has been the Occupy protesters themselves.
Thus the Occupy movement cannot solely be considered as the social world and a subject of
media messages, but also as group whose members use technology to produce messages. In the
hands of Occupy activists and people disillusioned with the US economic system, social
networking and mobile media have become the means for organising, spreading, and publicly
representing a nationwide protest movement. The Occupy movement essentially began online.
Berkowitz writes, “From a single hashtag, a protest circled the world” (2011). (A hashtag is a

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Twitter feature that designates a particular topic for a tweet, so all tweets with the same hashtag
can be viewed in the same stream.) “It all started innocuously enough with a July 13th blog post
urging people to #OccupyWallStreet, as though such a thing (Twitter hashtag and all) were
possible. It turns out, with enough momentum and a keen sense of how to use social media, it
actually is” (Berkowitz 2011, parentheses included in original). Note that according to Berkowitz
it was the conscientious use of social media, not necessarily the media itself, that made it a
mobilising force, reiterating Kraidy and Mourad‟s point that the most important factor in the use
of hypermedia space “people willing to use various connected media for specific social or
political purposes” (2010, p. 6). Thus Occupy protesters not only constitute the social world, but
they turn media to their own purposes of changing it and of representing themselves to the
broader public. Though Croteau and Hoynes‟ model does not specifically account for this new
scale of self-representation, their determination to study not just technology but “what people do
with technology” provides the basis for beginning to understand it as a product both of
technological capabilities and human motives (1997, p. 267).
Occupy protesters‟ use of media fits with the vision many new media scholars have had
of “a new model of democracy, a digital democracy” (Bentivegna 2002, p. 1). According to these
theorists, the Internet and related new media have an inherent democratic potential that must be
released by motivated, politically minded users in wishing to change the status quo of the current
social context (Bentivegna 2002, Kraidy & Mourad 2010). Otherwise, the double-headed sword
of technology may be turned against them. There is a call for activism and involvement in these
visions that emphasises user importance and responsibility, along with a complete transformation
of the established media which lacks the same potential for democracy as the new media
(Bentivegna 2002, p. 5). Along these lines, some Occupy protesters have expressed their desire
to create a new media system. An organiser interviewed in a New York Times article stated,
“we‟re fighting a system, and this media is a part of the system … and when this media doesn‟t
cover us in a fair light, the desire isn‟t to shame them, it‟s to create an alternative” (Stelter 2011).
Some of the most well known citizen journalists covering Occupy- the second group of
media users- see a different role for themselves, however. Tim Pool, for instance, not only shares
the widespread critical attitude toward mass media, but is also critical of bias in the media
coming from the Occupy movement itself (Anderson 2011). The messages surrounding Occupy
often fall into the categories of support or opposition, as demonstrated by the divergence

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between mainstream and Occupy coverage of police action. Tweets from the Occupysympathetic Huffington Post and describe the December 4th Occupy DC standoff as a
confrontation between respectful protesters and un-American police who “threw down the
American flag” from the protesters‟ structure and searched tents “without probable cause”
(twitter.com/#!/occupydc, cited in Copeland 2011, p. 1). An article in Campus Progress portrays
the police as absurdly over-responding with large, heavy equipment to a small number of
protesters (Crockett 2011). The Washington Post, on the other hand, features several blogs and
stories emphasising the restraint and professionalism of the police during the same standoff as
they faced defiant protesters (Bolden, Craig, Klein, Rosenwald, & Tomassoni 2011, Dvorak
2011). Frustrated by such bias, Pool aims to cover all sides of a story equally, not shying away
from the less admirable actions of Occupy protesters or of police. And while another live
streamer, AJ of AJwatchDC, does in his commentary share some of the emphasis on police
violence prevalent in pro-Occupy coverage, through the perspective of his live Ustream coverage
viewers see both the spatial and temporal context of all that happens. Through their largely
unedited live streams and willingness to respond to viewer comments and requests (AJ, like
Pool, responds to his Ustream chat feed comments) citizen journalists have created a role for
themselves as mostly unbiased observers willing to act as the eyes for the public and provide raw
first-person footage that people trust. For citizen journalists, media is a mirror of society, and
their work demonstrates ideals seemingly left behind by mainstream and alternative media alike.
Instant, unedited, footage is as close to the truth as their thousands of viewers can get without
being present; on the public‟s behalf, citizen journalists use new media technology to bridge
distance and serve as eyes on both the Occupy movement and the media covering it.
Hypermedia space and the changing role of the news industry
Some would take the primacy of independent citizen journalism in the Occupy movement
to be an expression of Bentivegna‟s claim that “communication processes have finally been freed
from the arbitration of journalism exercised in traditional media circles” (2002, p. 1). In the case
of Occupy protesters this means they are freer to represent themselves; in the case of citizen
journalists it means that media can be freed from institutional bias and also from the distributive
mechanisms of traditional media. To return to the points made at the beginning of this paper,
however, the mass media industries and their reporting are still relevant. Instead of an idealistic
utopia in which unfair old structures give way to fair new ones, what is emerging instead is a

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communicative sphere in which people using new media can contribute to, benefit from, and
criticise both mass and alternative media coverage. The multitude of perspectives and
information available in hypermedia space allows people to act as “media watchdogs”, and the
public is now “demanding more from mainstream media” (Kraidy & Mourad 2010, p. 10). User
comments criticising CNN (for instance, for covering celebrity functions instead of Occupy
protests, as one reporter condemned in a tweet3) and citizen journalists‟ efforts to cut through
bias exemplify these demands. Audience criticism is to some in the media industry indicative of
positive changes to be made, as people‟s demands of mass media serve to acknowledge firstly
that they are still watching it, and secondly that they view it as an important potential ally
(Kraidy & Mourad 12). If mass media coverage of Occupy were rendered irrelevant by new
independent media, the nature and amount of its coverage would not be important enough to
come under scrutiny. By creating alternatives, new media users are not so much rendering mass
media industries as irrelevant as they are pressuring them, through competition and criticism, to
adapt to the current social and technological context.
Mass media, in return, is increasingly turning to a less centralised, more interactive model
of news while also partnering with citizen journalists. Michael Fancher, a Pulitzer-winning
journalist and Donald D. Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow, has proposed a new “21st Century
Journalist‟s Creed” as a response to the “groundswell” of people creating and sharing news
independently through new media. As people become increasingly able to document and share
news through their own hypermedia channels, journalists must “let go of the sense that we have
control and recognize how much better public service journalism can be when we accept the
public as true partners” (Fancher 2009). Carvin‟s collaboration with his Twitter followers is not
unusual. Amateur or independent footage has not only contributed to, but has also been the
starting point for many significant stories in recent years, including the 2009 protests in Iran, the
2008 bombing in Mumbai, and the 2009 plane crash in the Hudson river. (Kraidy & Mourad
2010; Murthy 2011).
Thus, while the upheaval of the news industry that some expected has not happened, nor
has the stifling of new media‟s “democratic potential”. What is emerging instead is a public
sphere challenging the news industry to be better, and to work in tandem with the emerging
capabilities of the media-savvy public. Therefore, while Kraidy and Mourad emphasise that “for
3

Tweet from Citizen Radio’s Allison Kilkenny on 5th December 2011 (cited in Copeland 2011, p. 1).

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hypermedia chains to be effective, they must necessarily be integrated in pre-existing social
networks and institutions” (2010, p. 16), it is also the case that for mainstream media to be
effective, it has to integrate with the networks and discourses emerging in public hypermedia
space. As Croteau and Hoynes recognise, technology, society, and industry are all actors that
shape and influence each other. A useful update to their model will be the redefinition of
audiences, perhaps as Fancher proposes: “the public not as an audience but as a community, of
which journalism is a vital part” (Fancher 2009). Hypermedia space has forged connections that
make a clear division of audience and media industries no longer reflective of reality. Yet despite
being somewhat dated, the sociological model used here provides the kind of nuanced
framework that can accommodate an event as complex as Occupy and draw from it an
understanding of media today, in flux and in the hands of many.

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Story, L. (2008, 17th December). On Wall Street, bonuses, not profits, were real. The New York
Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com.
Story, L., & Morgensen, G. (2011, 14th April). In financial crisis, no prosecutions of top figures.
The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com.
Winston, B. (1998). Media Technology and Society: A History from the Telegraph to the
Internet. London: Routledge

Copeland

15
Copeland

16

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Hypermedia space in the Occupy movement: a sociological analysis

  • 1. Signed: Cortney Copeland. 9/1/2012. Copeland 1
  • 2. Hypermedia space in the Occupy movement: A sociological analysis of new media, its uses, and its implications for the news industry “Crowd chanting „media stay‟.” On December 4th, 2011, an individual tweeted this update as police asked reporters to move away from the front lines of a standoff with Occupy DC protesters camped in a public square (twitter.com/#!/search/OccupyDC 2011)1. This single act distils some of the most significant current questions about media, technology, and society into less than a few seconds and 140 characters. Perhaps the most central and contentious question is whether new media will render established media industries obsolete, ushering in a more democratic media, or instead will only be taken over by existing power structures. The Occupy movement that swept across the US and the world in the latter part of 2011 was born with a Twitter presence. The social networking website allows users to post and receive “tweets” of 140 characters or less from a variety of devices including computers and mobile phones. Mobile devices, live online video streams, and websites like YouTube and Twitter have been extremely important in coverage of the Occupy movement, making the communication surrounding it a prime example of what Kraidy and Mourad (2010) call “hypermedia space”. Yet even as people use technology to bypass traditional media channels, protesters and citizen journalists alike acknowledge the established news media‟s significance. Sweeping claims that new media will either disintegrate existing media industry structure or be tamed by it are necessarily complicated when a tweet comes to the defence of television camera crews, revealing the need for a new kind of discourse. Such a discourse must “explicate and theorize the ways in which a variety of „new‟ and „old‟ media connect to each other, rather than celebrating the rise of new media or lamenting the decline of the old” (Kraidy & Mourad 2010, p. 13). This discourse finds a firm basis in sociology. Taking the Occupy movement as a case study, this paper assesses the relationship between new and established media through the application of a sociological model proposed by Croteau and Hoynes (1997). Viewed from this perspective, the use of media As social media is an emerging field, there are currently no published standards for citation. Furthermore, tweets and video streams quoted in this paper may no longer be accessible due to the fact that these media are naturally live and are not automatically archived or stored. The author recommends to any researching in this area that they self-archive all data as it may be difficult to reference later. Some citations in this paper are based on author observation of media that can no longer be accessed. In these cases, as much reference information as possible has been given. 1 Copeland 2
  • 3. in the Occupy movement reveals the constructive potential of Kraidy and Mourad‟s view of hypermedia space as the integration of new and old media structures, as opposed to the battling theories in which one must dominate the other. Furthermore, application of the sociological model demonstrates both the usefulness of such a model, and the updates and improvements that can be made to it. A sociological approach: Balancing technological determinism with social shaping The sociological framework modelled by Croteau and Hoynes (1997) integrates and balances the conflicting theories that gave rise to the dichotomous debate criticised by Kraidy and Mourad. Present questions of whether professional news and journalism will become obsolete at the hands of democratised new media or co-opt its potential echoes the decades-old core debate between technological determinism and social shaping theories. Technological determinism, espoused by scholars such as Marshall MacLuhan and Nicholas Negroponte, assumes that technology is a fairly autonomous force that inevitably impacts society. Both MacLuhan and Negroponte have provided predictions about the way new media technologies will radically alter or even eradicate existing social structures. For instance, MacLuhan envisioned electronic media leading to “tribal-like participation in the „global village‟” as a direct result of its “connecting and unifying characteristics” (cited in Lister et al. 2008, p. 82). Likewise Negroponte predicted the obsolescence of nation-states, cities, and even retirement and alarm clocks (1998). Today, predictions include the democratisation of media and empowerment of the public on the scale of revolution; for instance, an article in The New Leader states that Twitter has dealt a blow to Iran‟s government and promoted democracy (“Iran‟s Twitter Revolution” 2009). Similar rhetoric abounds among many who support the citizen journalists of the Occupy movement, and will be discussed further on. Social shaping theorists, however, directly challenge the idea that technology can change society at all. MacLuhan‟s contemporary Williams asserts that social needs, groups, and power relations determine the technologies that are created, the ways in which they are used, and who uses them (cited in Lister et al. 2008, p. 86). Winston (1998) takes a similar approach, arguing further that while technologies and their uses arise from social circumstances, social institutions counteract the potential they may have to enable change. Discourse about a “digital divide” reveals how existing economic and social inequality is only widened by the poor‟s lack of access to new technology (Murthy 2011). Technology, according to these thinkers, only reinforces the Copeland 3
  • 4. status quo that gave rise to it. In the case of Twitter and citizen journalism, Murthy writes that while Twitter has to a degree enabled citizen journalism, citizen journalists and their work are quickly subsumed by the traditional mass media and thus not truly empowered by new technology. Rather than becoming known in their own right, citizen journalists simply provide information and disappear when this information makes its way into the established media channels (Murthy 2011, p. 12). Croteau and Hoynes, however, provide a framework that balances both technological determinism and social shaping by recognising the agency of both technology and of people. Their model goes beyond debating whether technology influences society or vise versa, integrating both viewpoints to portray a network of mutual influences. It is this mutuality that allows for a discussion of new media more cognizant of the complex realities reflected in cases like the Occupy movement. Croteau and Hoynes’ sociological model (Croteau and Hoynes 1997, p. 25, Simplified Model of Media and the Social World, Exhibit 1.5) The grey-shaded portion of the model represents the social world, in which technology, the media industry, media messages, and media audiences are all immersed and in which they all participate. Arrows represent potential relationships, and it is worth noting that all arrows denote two-way relationships. In the case of the Occupy movement, the social world consists of the people and actions of the movement and the larger US social context (including events like the economic recession). Copeland 4
  • 5. The fundamental assumption behind this approach reveals its grounding in social shaping theory: “we cannot understand the media without looking at them as one aspect of a larger social world” (Croteau & Hoynes 1997, p. 24). However, in a revision of adamant social shaping theory‟s claim of that technology causes no changes at all (Livingstone 2002, p. 3), the model does recognise technology as an actor, incorporating some of the important contributions of thinkers like MacLuhan. In the current study, technology is particularly important as the toolset for creating and accessing hypermedia space. It is worth quoting Kraidy and Mourad‟s description of hypermedia space in full: “the emergent global media environment is best understood as a transnational „hypermedia space‟ in which so-called „old‟ media like television and newspaper join emergent media like mobile devices, social media, video on the Internet, and others to create a communication space the social and political implications of which we are only beginning to discern” (2010, p. 1). The Occupy movement provides many examples of this, the quote that starts this paper being one of the most compelling. An individual at a protest tweeted from a mobile device to share online that protesters did not want the police to force mainstream media‟s video cameras to move. In this single instance, the different media of human voices, television cameras, mobile Internet devices, and social networking all interacted to form a hypermedia chain that both created and told a story. This story would later be told through the Internet, television, and print media alike. Kraidy and Mourad‟s ideas about creating a communicative “space” can build upon, or perhaps update, an interesting feature of the Croteau and Hoynes model: its separation of messages from media industry, technology, and audiences. This stands in contrast to MacLuhan‟s commonly quoted statement that “the medium is the message” (cited in Lister et al. 2008, p. 76). Rather, the media create a space for messages, and it is this space rather than the technology alone that is particularly influential. As the model acknowledges, while media industries along with individuals construct and distribute messages, these messages then enter the social world to be shared, interpreted, absorbed, critiqued, etc., by others. In hypermedia space this happens more rapidly than ever before, and distance has become largely irrelevant. The author was able to watch Occupy DC‟s December 4th protests live from several thousand miles away, view the comments given by people around the world in real time, and simultaneously browse news coverage about recent events and background information related to the movement. These various media are all copresent in the communicative realm of hypermedia Copeland 5
  • 6. space, and often linked to one another through hypertext. Thus, though Croteau and Hoynes‟ model largely pre-dates the rise of social networking and the idea of “hypermedia space”, this concept is useful in understanding how messages can exist, change form, and spread when they are no longer tied to the medium in which they originate. Sociological model of the Occupy movement This analysis of the Occupy movement begins with a description of the social world, followed by technology, as it has perhaps seen the most dramatic changes in recent time. The categories of audience and media industries are arguably no longer as clearly defined as they were even several years ago; therefore, audiences are instead considered “users” categorised on the basis of how they use new media and the type of media discourse their messages express. Media industries are then considered as they relate to these new users, while the final portion of the paper addresses an emerging vision of the media as an integrative network of industries and new media users. The Social World The Occupy movement emerged in a context of severe economic recession and perceived injustice. Beginning in 2008, the mainstream media revealed scandals and irresponsible policies of the banks, developers, and mortgage lenders behind the economic crisis that cost many people their homes, and the repercussions and legal proceedings are still ongoing at the time of writing (“Financial Crisis” 2011, Goodman & Morgensen 2008, Story 2008, Streitfield & Morgensen 2008). Hence the general focus of the Occupy movement is the economic inequality that has become more obvious in the recent years of economic crisis, and much of the anger among Occupiers is directed at banks and lenders who have not been prosecuted or punished- indeed, many CEOs have continued receiving large bonuses (Eisinger 2011, Story & Morgensen 2011, Story 2008). The wealthiest members of society have come under intense criticism from much of the public, particularly with the slogan “We are the 99%”. The phrase acknowledges the disproportionate economic and social power held by the top 1% of earners, although some wealthy Americans have joined in with a rallying cry of “We are the 1%. We stand with the 99%”. Pictures on their Tumblr website show wealthy people declaring their solidarity, many even saying that their taxes are unfairly low (westandwiththe99percent.tumblr.com). Occupy protests are based in urban tent encampments, typically in locations near centres of financial or Copeland 6
  • 7. political power like banks. While the movement has been largely peaceful, arrests and demands from cities and police to relocate encampments have been far from uncommon Additionally, 2010 and 2011 were years of worldwide unrest as protests in Egypt and Libya turned into revolutions and are still ongoing in Syria (topics.nytimes.com 2012a, 2012b, 2012c). Youth with access to mobile technology and social media were particularly influential in these movements. Technology Today‟s social world is permeated with and connected by technology, and especially by mobile technology and the Internet. Some of the most significant characteristics of new media technologies, especially for their uses related to the Occupy movement, are interactivity, mobility, instantaneousness, and the capacity for social networking. Additionally, a term that can be used to describe hypermedia space in particular is co-presence, referring to the presence of multiple kinds of media text in one communicative space (Bentivegna 2002, p. 6). This is made possible by digitalisation, which has provided a common language in which multiple devices can share media of multiple forms (video, audio, text, etc). Hypermedia space results from this ability of multiple media channels to form communicative chains, linking “once-discrete media … into a single seamless web of digital-electronic-telecommunications” (Deibert cited in Kaidy & Maroud 2010, p. 2). In the Occupy movement, mobile technology has been particularly important as people use their mobile devices to tweet, stream live video, or take and instantly share pictures. Ustream, an online network of live streaming channels, lists 198 streams from US Occupy camps- with many additional international streams (ustream.tv/occupytogether). A link below the video channels allows viewers to tweet them, sending links to the video into their Twitter feed. In an example of this “seamless web”, one comment posted on the OccupyDC Ustream channel chat feed on 3rd January 2012 declares, “I saw posts about this channel on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and AIM! Nuts!”( www.ustream.tv/channel/somd-at-occupydc). Through the Internet and social networking, one person with a mobile device can reach thousands of people worldwide with instant live information. When Time Video covered the work of citizen journalist Tim Pool, his Ustream channel was drawing over 6,000 viewers (“Occupy Wall Street‟s Live Streamer Tim Pool” 17 Nov. 2011), and Captain (2011) reports that during a raid of Occupy Wall Street‟s Zucotti Park camp he had over 20,000 simultaneous viewers. Copeland 7
  • 8. As Tim Pool tells Time Video, the interactivity of new media is one of its most important features. Not only can a citizen journalist broadcast a video stream to thousands of online viewers, but viewers can post comments live. Pool says, “One of the great things about the Ustream is that I have a chat feed on my phone, and people can ask questions and I can respond, or people can ask me to do something and I can do it” (“Occupy Wall Street‟s live streamer” 2011). His viewers even compare the interactive nature of watching Pool‟s live stream to a video game (Anderson 2011). Such interactivity has long been an object of attention for new media theorists. Sparks contrasts “dialogic” Internet communication to “monologic” mass media, stating that the former “permits the possibility of interactivity to a much greater extent than do the existing media” by virtue of its development as a means for point-to-point communication. For many new media scholars, this interactivity is conducive to a more democratic media and a more active public sphere cite from Red Book). Technology thus seems to have given the public- at least the members who can afford digital and electronic communication technology- an ability to broadcast news that is comparable to well-established mass media organisations. Many online user comments compare the amateur coverage done with handheld mobile devices favourably to the television coverage created by mass media companies‟ expensive equipment. One early December comment on the YouTube channel belonging to ajm72222, a live streamer from McPerson Square in DC, reads, “The few seconds on CNN made me laugh at the pathetic job a multimillion dollar company can do” (cited in Copeland 2011, p. 1). Similar discourse is common, with the viewers of live streams comparing the work of a single person with a handheld camera to news groups with scrambling production crews and large setups. In his article about Tim Pool and business partner Henry Ferry, Captain proclaims, “With little more than mobile phones they‟ve offered a perspective that the mainstream media can‟t match” (Captain 2011). Mainstream media seems to have followed public lead in its adoption of new media technologies. Twitter feeds related to the Occupy movement feature tweets from newspapers, television networks, and individual journalists who tweet live as they cover their stories, which are often re-tweeted and shared by other Twitter users. Andy Carvin from National Public Radio (NPR) says he sees Twitter as an “open source newsroom” when he is in the field, relying on the interactivity and social networking functions of the Internet and mobile technology to get 2 Abandoned 2nd December; Broadcasting resumed via AJwatchDC on Ustream. Copeland 8
  • 9. information from his Twitter followers (Sonderman 2012). Some news organizations have started their own live streams, although interestingly, many, including Al Jazeera English, have also used Pool‟s footage as well (Captain 2011). The re-broadcasting of Pool‟s live stream by mainstream television news exemplifies the integration of new and old media that Kraidy and Mourad call “hypermedia space”, and it is made possible by mobile digital technology, wireless Internet, and social networking. To assume that technology alone is responsible for changes in the media, however, is to fall into technological determinism. As Croteau and Hoynes point out in contrast to more deterministic claims, new technologies do not determine their own uses; they rather form a “structural constraint” that can both “enable and limit human action” (1997, p. 263). In fact, when Twitter was first launched, its potential role as a news source was not widely considered. In 2007, New Media Age addressed Twitter it as nothing more than a medium for mundane tidbits and social communication (Butcher 2007). Thus, as Croteau and Hoynes assert, a technology‟s impact significantly depends on how audiences and industries choose to use it, and this in turn depends on the needs and ideas present in the social world. No longer just audiences: Media users and the messages they create Croteau and Hoynes describe two kinds of media user: the media industries who make messages, and the audiences who interpret them. This limited acknowledgement of audience agency is now outdated. The active role people play in today‟s highly interactive communication sphere has caused many to feel that the lines between those who create media and those who consume it have been significantly blurred (Fancher 2009, Kraidy & Mourad 2010, Stelter 2011). The present document therefore addresses “users” related to the Occupy movement, grouped according to the kind of discourse about new media they seem to demonstrate or espouse. This classification therefore addresses messages as well. One major user group of hypermedia space has been the Occupy protesters themselves. Thus the Occupy movement cannot solely be considered as the social world and a subject of media messages, but also as group whose members use technology to produce messages. In the hands of Occupy activists and people disillusioned with the US economic system, social networking and mobile media have become the means for organising, spreading, and publicly representing a nationwide protest movement. The Occupy movement essentially began online. Berkowitz writes, “From a single hashtag, a protest circled the world” (2011). (A hashtag is a Copeland 9
  • 10. Twitter feature that designates a particular topic for a tweet, so all tweets with the same hashtag can be viewed in the same stream.) “It all started innocuously enough with a July 13th blog post urging people to #OccupyWallStreet, as though such a thing (Twitter hashtag and all) were possible. It turns out, with enough momentum and a keen sense of how to use social media, it actually is” (Berkowitz 2011, parentheses included in original). Note that according to Berkowitz it was the conscientious use of social media, not necessarily the media itself, that made it a mobilising force, reiterating Kraidy and Mourad‟s point that the most important factor in the use of hypermedia space “people willing to use various connected media for specific social or political purposes” (2010, p. 6). Thus Occupy protesters not only constitute the social world, but they turn media to their own purposes of changing it and of representing themselves to the broader public. Though Croteau and Hoynes‟ model does not specifically account for this new scale of self-representation, their determination to study not just technology but “what people do with technology” provides the basis for beginning to understand it as a product both of technological capabilities and human motives (1997, p. 267). Occupy protesters‟ use of media fits with the vision many new media scholars have had of “a new model of democracy, a digital democracy” (Bentivegna 2002, p. 1). According to these theorists, the Internet and related new media have an inherent democratic potential that must be released by motivated, politically minded users in wishing to change the status quo of the current social context (Bentivegna 2002, Kraidy & Mourad 2010). Otherwise, the double-headed sword of technology may be turned against them. There is a call for activism and involvement in these visions that emphasises user importance and responsibility, along with a complete transformation of the established media which lacks the same potential for democracy as the new media (Bentivegna 2002, p. 5). Along these lines, some Occupy protesters have expressed their desire to create a new media system. An organiser interviewed in a New York Times article stated, “we‟re fighting a system, and this media is a part of the system … and when this media doesn‟t cover us in a fair light, the desire isn‟t to shame them, it‟s to create an alternative” (Stelter 2011). Some of the most well known citizen journalists covering Occupy- the second group of media users- see a different role for themselves, however. Tim Pool, for instance, not only shares the widespread critical attitude toward mass media, but is also critical of bias in the media coming from the Occupy movement itself (Anderson 2011). The messages surrounding Occupy often fall into the categories of support or opposition, as demonstrated by the divergence Copeland 10
  • 11. between mainstream and Occupy coverage of police action. Tweets from the Occupysympathetic Huffington Post and describe the December 4th Occupy DC standoff as a confrontation between respectful protesters and un-American police who “threw down the American flag” from the protesters‟ structure and searched tents “without probable cause” (twitter.com/#!/occupydc, cited in Copeland 2011, p. 1). An article in Campus Progress portrays the police as absurdly over-responding with large, heavy equipment to a small number of protesters (Crockett 2011). The Washington Post, on the other hand, features several blogs and stories emphasising the restraint and professionalism of the police during the same standoff as they faced defiant protesters (Bolden, Craig, Klein, Rosenwald, & Tomassoni 2011, Dvorak 2011). Frustrated by such bias, Pool aims to cover all sides of a story equally, not shying away from the less admirable actions of Occupy protesters or of police. And while another live streamer, AJ of AJwatchDC, does in his commentary share some of the emphasis on police violence prevalent in pro-Occupy coverage, through the perspective of his live Ustream coverage viewers see both the spatial and temporal context of all that happens. Through their largely unedited live streams and willingness to respond to viewer comments and requests (AJ, like Pool, responds to his Ustream chat feed comments) citizen journalists have created a role for themselves as mostly unbiased observers willing to act as the eyes for the public and provide raw first-person footage that people trust. For citizen journalists, media is a mirror of society, and their work demonstrates ideals seemingly left behind by mainstream and alternative media alike. Instant, unedited, footage is as close to the truth as their thousands of viewers can get without being present; on the public‟s behalf, citizen journalists use new media technology to bridge distance and serve as eyes on both the Occupy movement and the media covering it. Hypermedia space and the changing role of the news industry Some would take the primacy of independent citizen journalism in the Occupy movement to be an expression of Bentivegna‟s claim that “communication processes have finally been freed from the arbitration of journalism exercised in traditional media circles” (2002, p. 1). In the case of Occupy protesters this means they are freer to represent themselves; in the case of citizen journalists it means that media can be freed from institutional bias and also from the distributive mechanisms of traditional media. To return to the points made at the beginning of this paper, however, the mass media industries and their reporting are still relevant. Instead of an idealistic utopia in which unfair old structures give way to fair new ones, what is emerging instead is a Copeland 11
  • 12. communicative sphere in which people using new media can contribute to, benefit from, and criticise both mass and alternative media coverage. The multitude of perspectives and information available in hypermedia space allows people to act as “media watchdogs”, and the public is now “demanding more from mainstream media” (Kraidy & Mourad 2010, p. 10). User comments criticising CNN (for instance, for covering celebrity functions instead of Occupy protests, as one reporter condemned in a tweet3) and citizen journalists‟ efforts to cut through bias exemplify these demands. Audience criticism is to some in the media industry indicative of positive changes to be made, as people‟s demands of mass media serve to acknowledge firstly that they are still watching it, and secondly that they view it as an important potential ally (Kraidy & Mourad 12). If mass media coverage of Occupy were rendered irrelevant by new independent media, the nature and amount of its coverage would not be important enough to come under scrutiny. By creating alternatives, new media users are not so much rendering mass media industries as irrelevant as they are pressuring them, through competition and criticism, to adapt to the current social and technological context. Mass media, in return, is increasingly turning to a less centralised, more interactive model of news while also partnering with citizen journalists. Michael Fancher, a Pulitzer-winning journalist and Donald D. Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow, has proposed a new “21st Century Journalist‟s Creed” as a response to the “groundswell” of people creating and sharing news independently through new media. As people become increasingly able to document and share news through their own hypermedia channels, journalists must “let go of the sense that we have control and recognize how much better public service journalism can be when we accept the public as true partners” (Fancher 2009). Carvin‟s collaboration with his Twitter followers is not unusual. Amateur or independent footage has not only contributed to, but has also been the starting point for many significant stories in recent years, including the 2009 protests in Iran, the 2008 bombing in Mumbai, and the 2009 plane crash in the Hudson river. (Kraidy & Mourad 2010; Murthy 2011). Thus, while the upheaval of the news industry that some expected has not happened, nor has the stifling of new media‟s “democratic potential”. What is emerging instead is a public sphere challenging the news industry to be better, and to work in tandem with the emerging capabilities of the media-savvy public. Therefore, while Kraidy and Mourad emphasise that “for 3 Tweet from Citizen Radio’s Allison Kilkenny on 5th December 2011 (cited in Copeland 2011, p. 1). Copeland 12
  • 13. hypermedia chains to be effective, they must necessarily be integrated in pre-existing social networks and institutions” (2010, p. 16), it is also the case that for mainstream media to be effective, it has to integrate with the networks and discourses emerging in public hypermedia space. As Croteau and Hoynes recognise, technology, society, and industry are all actors that shape and influence each other. A useful update to their model will be the redefinition of audiences, perhaps as Fancher proposes: “the public not as an audience but as a community, of which journalism is a vital part” (Fancher 2009). Hypermedia space has forged connections that make a clear division of audience and media industries no longer reflective of reality. Yet despite being somewhat dated, the sociological model used here provides the kind of nuanced framework that can accommodate an event as complex as Occupy and draw from it an understanding of media today, in flux and in the hands of many. Copeland 13
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