In the end, I created Visions of Occupy: a Tumblr blog populated automatically using some of the data from the ORGS, “mashed up” with some of the Occupy related photos posted to Flickr. For more info and the ongoing project, take a look here.

In The Crowd, Gustave Le Bon notes that:

“be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation.”

Nearly 100 years after The Crowd was published, Hyman Spotnitz, in a lecture on modern psychoanalysis called “Large Group Analaysis: Regression, Progression, Creativity,” points out that:

“Every now and then in smaller groups I would find that one patient would say something that would have a strikingly dramatic effect on the emotions of another patient. It was as though psychological fusion occurred on some level and had the effect of inspiring both people. It was a sort of psychological orgasm for both and they both became creative and changed.”

As the students in class realized they all shared a similar bitterness towards the other riders on the T, they began to align in their criticism. No matter the fact that being a rider themselves, they were at risk of committing the transgressions about which they were commiserating. An otherwise quiet group, consisting of students from various backgrounds and even majors within the school, became animated by one another. One or two complaints about public transportation led to a significant discussion, each comment inspiring another. This was “a sort of collective mind” experiencing a “a sort of psychological orgasm.”

But psychological orgasm a social movement does not make.

A few weeks after the public transportation discussion in class, my wife and I attended a public hearing for proposed service cuts and fare hikes for the MBTA. The meeting was organized by the MBTA and facilitated by various higher-ups within the organization. It was attended by an extremely diverse subsection of the Greater Boston population: citizens of all ethnicities, income brackets, and physical ability. The largest and most visible group in attendance, however, was a few dozen local students.

After a highly visible protest outside the Boston Public Library (the site of the meeting), the group moved in to the public hearing room where, as Boston.com puts it, they “broke into loud chants before the public comment period, including ‘Stand Up, Fight Back.’” The news site continues, “During the hearing, many attendees heckled Mark Boyle, assistant general manager for development at the MBTA, and booed loudly as he laid out the grim financial picture facing the agency.”

My wife and I were sitting next to the gentleman who seemed to be leading the heckling and chants. As he interrupted Boyle to yell “we already heard this, we don’t want to hear this again!” I turned to him and asked him to be quiet. I noted that I hadn’t heard this yet and was interested in what Boyle had to say. The gentleman suggested I simply read the pamphlet that had been handed out and keep to myself. I pointed out that I could certainly read the pamphlet, but if his group of protestors wanted to speak, I’d have to ignore them to do so [audio of this exchange and other points from the meeting will be posted to this space later today].

The youth leader was not happy with me, but he stopped heckling for a bit. Later, he tried to quiet his own group when they tried to heckle Mayor Menino. “He agrees with us, guys!” he yelled. Apparently, he had no interest in listening to opposing messages (or even simply facts presented by the “opposition”), only ones of affirmation.

After the meeting, my wife and I discussed what had happened. We readily agreed that the proposed cuts and fare hikes were bad news for the city, its workers, and its youth. We were disappointed, however, in our inability to commiserate with others who agreed with us—simply because of the manner in which they behaved during the meeting. Much like my students had a few weeks earlier, protestors picked up on one another’s energy and enthusiasm and used that to make their presence known at the meeting. For whatever reason, however, my wife and I were not able to partake.

As anecdotal as this story is, it brings to mind the assertions made by John McCarthy and Mayer Zald in Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory. Specifically, McCarthy and Zald note that simply agreeing with the grievances of a group of people does not mean you are a member of the social movement associated with said grievances.

Instead, the two posit that “social movements may or may not be based upon the grievances of the presumed beneficiaries” and that “dilemmas occur in the choice of tactics, since what may achieve one aim may conflict with harbor aimed at achieving another.” The constant outbursts and noise-making alienated my wife and I during the meeting, even tho we shared a common grievance with the protestors.

Fortunately, McCarthy and Zald provide a framework through which we can still align ourselves with these grievances. Be it by considering ourselves adherents to the movement (conscience-based or otherwise), or by simply finding a different social movement organization within the social movement itself (allowing us to work towards common target goals, though via different tactics), my wife and I can still do what we feel comfortable doing to work to resolve the problems we see in a system (in this case, the system being the MBTA).

In The Crowd, Le Bon notes that members of a group “can only bring to bear in common on the work in hand those mediocre qualities which are the birthright of every average individual. In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated.” Perhaps my wife and I were turned away by what we considered to be a stupid tactic taken up by the youth protestors. Maybe what we must now do is find a group whose average individual aligns more with what we consider to be reasonable.

It’s an odd experience to be reading lit-reviews regarding information and communication technologies (ICT’s) from six years ago. On the one hand, a review from 2006 will only include technologies and movements written about ten years ago—a lifetime in the technology world. On the other, so many principles highlighted by both Garrett and Castells can be applied to today’s ICT landscape.

Overall, I found Manuel Castells’ Communication, Power and Counter-power in the Network Society to be the most inspiring of all of the pieces read this week. His abstraction of the topic to the “fundamental battle being fought…over the minds of the people” and “the way people think” spoke to the theoretical approach I’m hoping to take in my work in general. His specific examples are timely to his piece, however, leaving me seeking out some of his more recent work. In particular, his calling out MySpace, Kazaa, and HotSoup.com—combined with only a singular mention of Facebook—provide a constant reminder of how much the tech-brand landscape has changed in the past five years.

I approached R. Kelly Garrett’s Protest in an Information Society: A Review of Literature on Social Movements and New ICTs with a skeptical eye as well. After all, how could a six year old lit-review provide any sort of relevant context in a field where the subject matter changes on a daily basis. But the piece was rather general—laying out a framework rather than specific technologies. I did find Earl and Schussman’s assertion that “Movement Entrepreneurs” would take advantage of “personal grievances” and “the greater number of online-only movements” to be rather unfounded. I’m open to examples to the contrary, but nothing comes to mind off the bat. The notion of “online-only movements” seems rather antiquated on its own: even the movement against SOPA, a uniquely technologically-relevant issue, required old-fashioned phone-in campaigns to the offices of members of congress (albeit helped along by a bit of tech).

But where both Garrett’s and Castells’ specific examples felt relatively irrelevant, their overall themes were the opposite. Whether it was Castells’ assertions regarding the self-generated nature of “a new form of socialized communication” or Garrett’s framework—featuring mobilizing structures, opportunity structures, and framing processes—these articles absolutely provided a strong foundation upon which to analyze social movements and their use of ICTs. As did Aday, et al’s Blogs and Bullets: New Media In Contentious Politics—though this one provided a significantly more up-to-date tech landscape.

And so I turn to wondering about the nature of academic work in general. As someone who got here through a rather non-traditional means (an undergraduate degree in business, six years working in advertising, an MFA program), I am thoroughly unfamiliar with the process of paper publication. On the surface, the pieces from Garrett and Castells seem to be presented under a more academic umbrella than Blogs and Bullets (even though the United States Institute on Peace works with George Washington University, it doesn’t seem to be a primarily academic institution). Does this contribute to the out-of-date nature of the two pieces?

I’m always trying to take context into consideration when reading anything—be it academic papers, news articles, or fiction. Year of publication is an important indicator to why or how certain arguments are made. But the most one can do is hope that an article transcends the time period in which it is published—something I believe all three of these accomplish.

I was intrigued by the process adopted by the Occupy movement from the get-go: I was not familiar with formal consensus processes, though I knew that the concept of consensus itself was of great relevance to my overall curiosities. Thus, when it came time to determine a semester project, I sought to gain a greater understanding of the role of the individual within the consensus process: specifically, how someone resolves what they believe to be the best course of action with what is eventually agreed upon by the larger group as a whole. As I began to perform interviews at Occupy Boston, I realized this was a significantly more complex question than originally considered.

Further writing on this, plus a link to my final paper, can be found here.

Did you use it last year? Do you have any comments or ideas? Drop me a line if so.

This week’s readings were particularly relevant to my project research, so it was exciting to read these having just returned from the [extremely chilly pre-snow] OccupyBoston site. I only got two interviews in before I had to head out (I’ll be returning for more soon), but I think I gained some important insight into the relationship between the “I” and the “We” at Occupy. Mostly, though, the interviews I conducted at Dewey Square got me thinking about the role professionalism and locality play in the success of an anti-establishment movement, and also what a move from fringe to mainstream does to that movement.

Read more at civic.mit.edu.

If you’re interested in the topic, these were the readings we did:

Related: now you know when to rob my house.