who will occupy wall street?

With over 700 arrested over the weekend and hardly a peep from the nations mainstream media, the US Occupy Wall Street protest against the nations state of economic affairs and policy has been an interesting one to witness from the other side of the globe.

And of course, without being there how do you know what to believe? How can you make a fair assessment when your perception might be at the mercy of the voice of those who may not have your best interests at heart? Perhaps that's when the power of social media really does come in to play, because these people don't profit by sharing their story, they're giving you insight in to their world in order to empower and protect their community without the bias or perversion of a middle-body's agenda.

A perfect, somewhat disturbing, example of this can be seen below where the New York Times changed the first line of a story about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. The change subtly shifted the blame for the mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge from the police to the protesters. In the first version of the story, police allowed them onto the bridge and then “cut off and arrested” them. In the second, there was a “showdown” in which demonstrators “marched onto the bridge.” Adding interest, the author of the piece was changed from “Colin Moynihan” to “Al Baker and Colin Moynihan.” Who is Al Baker? He is the guy in charge of the police bureau at the Times.

via Society Page

So once again the internet has been a key enabler for organising the masses and while news portals such as CNN have kept shtum about the reality of what’s going on, people have taken the lead in becoming content producers, citizen journalists, the voices from the ground sharing livestreams, twitter updates, videos and blogs to let the rest of the country and the world know what is really going on and continue to organise further protests (there are over 60 locations around the country right now).

Some of the most upsetting footage has uploaded on to YouTube (for example, this one showing innocent female demonstrators being maced in the face by a police officer).

But there are suspicions that even the diplomacy of Twitter has been compromised (with over 1 billion tweets, how was #occupywallstreet not a trending topic?) and knowing governments are getting in to bed with social networks and mobile phone providers, one might question what side of the fence these conversation platforms are on... But people continue to be the propagators of a message they feel needs to be heard nevertheless and that message is platform agnostic so long as there's the infrastructure in place and people willing and able to listen to it.

via Laurel Papworth

And what are these people so upset about? Is there any wonder? Was it only a matter of time?

More charts on Mother Jones

A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of the US? $31,244. The economic downturn shook the many and yet benefited significantly the few.

And what will happen? In a representational democracy the government must respond to the wishes of its people. Otherwise it becomes a dictatorship. And that doesn’t sound like the ‘land of the free’ to me.