Occupy Wall Street, London, Amsterdam..occupy…occupy.. everywhere!

By Jacquelien van Stekelenburg

Additional tags: Occupy , 15M

The 15M demonstrations in Spain formed the kick off of the indignados  (outraged) movement  which took much of their inspiration from the Arab  Spring. Occupy Wall street followed suit and soon occupy camps popped up  at central squares all over the world.

A comparison between different Spanish demonstrations showed that mobilization through social media managed to channel collective outrage through many small organizations with little mobilization experience and brought an unusual crowd into the streets. Participants had an unusual profile: they were significantly younger, more educated, more likely to be women and unemployed, and less likely to have been previously politically engaged.

People are becoming increasingly connected as individuals rather than as members of a community or group. Traditional ‘greedy’ institutions such as trade unions and churches which made significant demands on members’ time, loyalty and energy (Coser, 1974) are replaced by ‘light’ groups and associations that are loose, easy to join and easy to leave.

Despite this process of individualization people are still committed to collective causes. Underlying this, is what Lichterman (1996) calls ‘personalism’: people feel a personal sense of political responsibility rather than feeling restricted or obliged to a community or group. The role of social media sites is not that they allow individuals to virtually or in reality meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to publicly display their connections and make visible their social networks (Boyd and Ellison 2007). This public display of connections is a crucial component of social networks sites which can result in connections between individuals that would not otherwise be made. As such, the internet created an additional public sphere; people are nowadays embedded in virtual networks in addition to (in)formal physical networks. This is important and relevant in the context of mobilization, because the more people are socially embedded - formal, informal and virtual - the higher the chances that they will be targeted with a mobilizing message and kept to their promises to participate and the more they participate in protest. As such individualization processes amplified by ICTs made virtual embeddedness - in addition to formal and informal embeddedness - a key factor for mobilization. Individualization and liquefying (virtual) structures have given the world a new look and organizers for social change are faced with new uncertainties and challenges. As these liquefying (virtual) mobilizing structures are more ad hoc, less constraining and usually only exist for a limited amount of time, they fit well with many people’s desire for individuality, autonomy and their flexible modern online-offline hybrid lifestyle.

However, these loose structures may also have their draw-backs. Although they seem a suitable tool for organizers to draw youngsters into the streets, they may be less effective to mobilize older generations. And the fact that these loose structures leave so much room for individuality and own initiative, may make the political claims diffuser and possible less powerful. Moreover, loose structures are - by definition - less long-lasting, less demanding and more diverse.

Taken our empirical observations of the Occupy protests it seems at least safe to conclude that protest is less and less staged by the usual suspects such as the Unions, political parties, or large NGOs. Instead a plethora of social networks and structures develops both online and offline in complex and overlapping patterns. Are organizers therefore less able to draw people into the streets for higher risks, higher costs or more enduring action, when using liquid structures rather than solid ones? It’s too soon to tell and many questions remain. Yet, the Occupy protestors around the world are so far proving the sceptics wrong.