Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street was an encampment-based protest movement against economic inequality that began in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan in September 2011 and spread to encampments in other cities. It organized through open general assemblies rather than formal leadership, and documented itself continuously through livestreams and social media.

Two polls, two pictures

The movement’s public standing is a good illustration of why a single survey number should not be quoted as “public opinion”.

Gallup, surveying October 15-16, 2011, asked about approval of the movement’s goals and found 22% approving, 15% disapproving, and 63% with no opinion — the dominant finding being that most Americans had not formed one. Pew Research Center, surveying October 20-23 with a differently worded question about supporting or opposing the movement, found 39% supporting and 35% opposing. The two are not in conflict; they measure different things. This page cites both rather than the more quotable one.

Media practice

Costanza-Chock’s contemporaneous study treats Occupy’s media work as central to it rather than incidental — the movement produced its own coverage, in real time, as a matter of practice. Tremayne’s network analysis of Occupy-related Twitter activity examines how attention concentrated and spread across accounts during the protests.

Both are cited here for what they establish about the movement’s media practice. Claims that Occupy “pioneered” livestream protest coverage or invented decentralized coordination are common, and neither source supports a priority claim of that kind; the earlier version of this page made several, and they have been removed.

Status

Recorded as defunct: the encampments were cleared and the movement as such did not persist. That records the end of the movement, not of the concerns it organized around.