I was perusing my favourite magazine online today (Elle of course) and found a blog post about Occupy Wall Street that made a couple obvious jabs, but nevertheless enlightening. The post centred around the filming of the “front lines” of Occupy Wall Street to be aired on a show called ‘True Life” for MTV. The writer mused on the fact that connecting with the protesters was so easy, questioning the protesters use of smartphones and access to computers. And this is where things got confusing for me. If you have these devices like smartphones and computers that are becoming more and more necessary in our day-to-day living how are we supposed to rid of corporate greed–especially with constant brand competition (Mac vs. PC anyone?)?
The “Occupy” movement began on Wall Street in New York on September 17, 2011. It’s now the end of October and the movement is still continuing. My initial reaction to Occupy Wall Street was very suspicious since the whole thing just seemed a little general, I mean fighting against capitalism and corporate greed…ok, but where is this going? It just felt like there must be some sort of underlying motive here, or maybe a bunch over-educated people decided there hadn’t been a protest in a while and thought they would see how far social media could take them. It’s a pessimistic view, I know.
After sitting down and taking the time to scan over various articles I understand that the whole point is to be vague and general. The promotional poster above raises the question, What is our one demand? I thought this was interesting because I guess it is, technically one demand, but a complex one that is a huge part of a North American’s life. The oh so reliable, Wikipedia took me to a site called democracynow.org which had a blogged interview with a Princeton Professor, Cornel West, who said “It’s impossible to translate the issue of the greed of Wall Street into one demand or two demands.” This statement cemented the sense that this protest was going for a minimalist feel; you know, not here for violence, strictly here to have our voices heard. The Wikipedia article also mentioned that one of the main goals was to get as many people involved as possible–strength in numbers kind of deal I guess.
Celebrities have been making appearances at the Occupy sites
My career choices are heading down the path of marketing, sooo I’m finding it a tad difficult to decide where I stand in this whole thing. One interesting point I found during my research (if that’s what you can call an hour of Googling), is that the movement actually spawned from the Vancouver-based magazine Adbusters! I did get quite excited when I found this out because it isn’t often that something so large begins so close to home. Adbusters, if you don’t already know, is an advertisment-free, anti- consumerist magazine.
Now, I have a hard time figuring out where the line gets drawn in terms of being a consumer and buying in to corporate greed. It’s hard to see how the 99% of the population (main tagline stating wealth inequality) is able to switch from purchasing at Wal-Mart to purchasing from the local grocery store because the reason they can’t buy there is that everything is too expensive and usually doesn’t come in reasonable quantities for a single family anyway. Even for me, still living at home and going to school, I have to watch my spending. For example, I would love to purchase Adbusters or even go as far as subscribe, but it’s around $7 for one issue. I’ll opt out and spend that money on a latte…
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