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.

happiness shouldn't cost the earth

I really like this TED talk.

There are many methods that exist today whereby we rely on the old systems which served a great purpose back in the day, but transposed in to the world we live in right now, may not be the most efficient way about it.

Nic Marks asks us to question a country's measure of success, the definition we rely on is a financial one, the GDP. But production doesn't relate to happiness and that is what really matters to people, in fact, as Simon Kuznets said in the 1930's "a nations welfare can scarcely be inferred from their national income" and so based on the scarced resource, the planet, what system is an effective one for measuring people's well-being whilst also considering that production isn't necessarily sustainable?

He believes the Happiness Index.

Asked in order of preference what was most important to a survey of people (importance ratings worldwide):

1. Happiness
2. Love
3. Health
4. Wealth
   

As you can see the first three are very close to one another, wealth on the other hand important, but not ranking so highly. So why is it we hear daily media updates on the stock exchange, the exchange rates, the performance of gold and yet we don't learn of a country's energy use? How close we are to achieving our carbon emission targets? As Marks puts it - our "collective goals"?

Marks also eludes to some truths in terms of what does make people happy:

• Connections - social relationships are the most important cornerstones of your life. Connectivity will also allow us to work together to achieve something good and if something does go wrong (peak oil for example), its these communities that will really make a difference to how we adjust and survive it.
• Be active - do things, go outside, listen to music. Being stagnant doesn't make us happy.
  
• Take notice - mindfulness is very strong for our well-being, cognitive therapy talks to how being in the moment and aware of your surroundings will help you feel good.
  
• Keep learning - being ever curious, always learning throughout your lifetime will keep you happier longer.
  
• Give - altruism and compassion are all hardwired to the reward mechanism in our brains, this something I am very much interested in (Changing the perceptions of giving)
  

And so bringing this to a grassroots level, whilst here we can question a country's measurement of its success (set in a time when production was paramount to the country's development), I feel there is another big question to ask - what is the correct measurement of the success of ourselves?