Noise-Making, Occupy Wall Street, and the Politics of Amplification

Resonance ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-280
Author(s):  
John Vilanova
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Media Activism ◽  
The Status ◽  
Drum Circles ◽  
Acoustic Device

This research explores a set of sound technologies deployed during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City’s Zuccotti Park. It examines the People’s Microphone, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) sound cannon, the drum circle, and the noise complaint. Deepening understandings of their places within the contemporary urban soundscape and their use during the protests, it uses historical research, textual analysis, and qualitative discourse analysis methods to explore the technologies within a larger framework of the city’s discourses around (in)appropriate sound and action. Its findings suggest that each individual technology was evidence for the nature of its user in a way that presaged how the conflict would play out. The microphone epitomized the ideology (and fragility) of the hyper-democratic Occupiers’ ethos. The LRAD suggested the state’s superlative sonic capability and its “monopoly on the legitimate use of noise.” And the drum circles and noise complaints that followed ultimately showed the ways “noise-making” is better understood as a discursive construction that delegitimizes sound. Together, they suggest the ways the hegemonic soundscape serves the status quo. The essay also elaborates a taxonomy of sonic terms, specifically exploring volume, amplification, and noise-making as terms that explain the dynamics of sound during protest. It offers scholars of media activism a toolkit for sound studies that gets at the dynamics and structures of sonic power and explores the way sound-making is a key battleground of modernity. Sound conventions are a way that contemporary society is codified, legislated, and contested.

‘Have a Quiet, Orderly, Polite Revolution’: Framing Political Protest and Protecting the Status Quo

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 733-751
Author(s):  
Tamara J. Lynn ◽  
L. Susan Williams
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Print Media ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Presidential Candidates ◽  
The Status

This paper demonstrates how print media sources frame the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in ways that, consciously or not, support the prevailing status quo – social, economic, and political elites. The study employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the analytic framework, investigating how print media (sometimes referred to as ‘print capitalism’) utilized framing techniques that disparaged the two political organizations but in very different ways. The analysis incorporates articles appearing in the New York Post and the New York Times from the inception of each organization, through six weeks after the 2012 Presidential Inauguration; articles were coded to uncover themes that defined both organizations as ‘outsiders.’ Tea Partiers are characterized as irrational demagogues, while Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activities are criminalized; both are dismissed as irrelevant, leaving the predominant ‘mainstream’ political rule intact. Findings identify tools of discourse used by media to limit the influence of competing movements while essentially protecting the status quo. Revealing these tools provides clues to unreliable discourse in media coverage of presidential candidates, which tends to quash open debate and threaten principles of participatory government.

Self-Rule in the Balance

2016 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Seth Sandronsky
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Current Form ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
The Status ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Reagan Era

Paul Street, They Rule: The 1% vs. Democracy (London: Routledge, 2014), 252 pages, $30.95, paperback.In They Rule, Paul Street offers a thorough deconstruction of the status quo of U.S. capitalism. The book's subtitle gives a nod to the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose main victory was to popularize the concept of U.S. class conflict, as embodied in the "1 percent." The title also recalls John Carpenter's 1987 film They Live, a sci-fi spoof of the Reagan era that prefigured the Occupy revolt. Carpenter's characters don "magic sunglasses" for intellectual defense against media misinformation.… One current form of that misinformation is the view that the Democratic Party exercises "left" politics. Street smashes this notion.… [However,] this is no academic query.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Spokesperson is a four-letter word: Public relations and power in Occupy New York

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camille Reyes
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Dual Roles ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Public Relations Practitioners ◽  
Media System ◽  
The Status ◽  
Contested Meanings

Adding to the growing literature considering public relations practitioners as activists, this qualitative, interpretative research article explores the controversial idea of acting as spokesperson for a so-called leaderless social movement, Occupy Wall Street (OWS). Through interviews with members of the erstwhile OWS Press Relations Working Group in New York, this article explores their negotiated dual roles as both activists and practitioners. Using critical cultural theory with its emphasis on power, context, and history, the group’s media relations tactics are discussed with an emphasis on the role of spokesperson, revealing contested meanings about public relations work. The framework of the circuit of culture explains the constraints experienced by many of these activist practitioners as they navigated ideals of their movement that were often in conflict with their public relations practices. The study finds uneasy relationships with power in relation to internal and external communication. Specifically, the group disrupts the false binaries of managerial and critical cultural approaches to public relations, as well as agency and oppression through contextual power. Their work brokers a paradox – speaking to change the status quo through a media system arguably captured by the status quo, while using a tactic that was seen as equally problematic.

scholarly journals The Organizational Trace of an Insurgent Moment

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 237802311770065 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam D. Reich
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
York City ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Formal Organizations ◽  
Movement Organizations ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between social movements and formal organizations has long been a concern to scholars of collective action. Many have argued that social movement organizations (SMOs) provide resources that facilitate movement emergence, while others have highlighted the ways in which SMOs institutionalize or coopt movement goals. Through an examination of the relationship between Occupy Wall Street and the field of SMOs in New York City, this article illustrates a third possibility: that a moment of insurgency becomes a more enduring movement in part through the changes it induces in the relations among the SMOs in its orbit.

Race

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Schickler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Business Regulation ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The Status

This chapter examines the status quo before the start of the civil rights realignment, showing that civil rights was simply not viewed as part of the standard “liberal program” as of the early 1930s. Although African Americans were vocal in attacking Franklin D. Roosevelt's weak civil rights record, they were largely alone. When whites on the left pushed Roosevelt to be a more forthright liberal or progressive, they criticized him for inadequate support for labor, weak business regulation, and insufficient recovery spending—but not for his failure to back civil rights. At this early stage, the “enemies” of a liberal Democratic Party generally were not identified with the South but instead were probusiness Democrats from the Northeast, associated with Al Smith of New York. Economic questions were the key battleground in the eyes of white liberals, and civil rights did not figure in these debates.

New Wind

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Cornell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
York City ◽  
College Graduates ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
World War ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
New Generation

Something of a revolution in anarchist thought occurred during the 1940s and early 1950s, much of it centered in New York City. World War II divided the small contingent of U.S. anarchists active during the Depression years, as many movement veterans reluctantly endorsed the Allies as the only viable means of defeating fascism. However, a new generation of activists -- many of them recent college graduates -- established journals and organizations that rejected participation in the war, often on pacifist grounds, and that began to reevaluate central tenets of anarchist theory. This chapter explores the milieu that developed in New York City, Woodstock, NY, and rural New Jersey at mid-century, focusing on three "little magazines" that supported and influenced one another: Politics, Why?, and Retort. Although anarchism was at a numerical nadir during these years, a tight-knit community of artists, theorists, and radical pacifists developed ideas, tactics, and aesthetics that reshaped anarchism so fundamentally that they remain prominent today in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

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