Occupy Twitter

From riotous activists to digital pacifists: how social media has transformed America's youth.

On April 23, 1968, 1,000 Columbia University students and faculty rallied together at Low Plaza. Their mission: to protest the university’s involvement in Vietnam and to stop the construction of a student gym in Harlem’s Morningside Park. They would then storm into Low Library, present their demands to the administration and request to be given an open hearing.

But as the demonstration wrapped up, the crowd soon learned that all would not go according to plan. Mark Rudd, the radical yet charismatic leader of Students for a Democratic Society, hopped onto the sundial affront the library and announced that its doors had been locked. With nothing to fear but expulsion, the Columbia Protest of 1968 began.

What ensued within the next week would set the bar high for future college protests and demonstrations. Posters of Che Guevara and Karl Marx overtook campus buildings. Students took Dean Henry S. Coleman hostage in a classroom. The entire effort was organized through handwritten letters and face-to-face conversation. Not a laptop was opened. Not a tweet was sent. And although their mission was eventually met with police brutality, the effort put forth by this group of visionaries was a success, as plans for the gym crumbled and Columbia cut its ties with the government.

“It was a combination of years of organizing - meaning educational work on campus, agitation, confrontation, involving people in discussion - and a perfect storm of a political moment which occurred in the spring of 1968,” said Rudd, whose future involvement in a radical leftist organization, the Weatherman Underground, would lead him into hiding for almost seven years.

Fast forward 44 years and you can see that same desire for social change in our generation. With the dawn of the Internet and social networking, our ability to contribute to society is no longer bound by our location or our lack of accessible mainstream media. From the comfort of our dorm rooms, we can exchange political viewpoints with someone whom we have never met in California. We can help save someone from cancer solely by convincing our Twitter followers to join a bone marrow registry. We can aid in catapulting a man to presidency simply by making his name a fixture on newsfeeds everywhere.

So, when a YouTube video gets mentioned on the Twitter feed of a celebrity with over 1,000,000 followers, you can bet it will be retweeted and shared more than a handful of times. It took the popular Invisible Children’s KONY 2012 campaign just two days to reach 9.6 million views. Four days later, the video reached 100 million views, demonstrating how quickly digital content could spread when placed upon the fingers of a few key influential account holders. While both speed and efficiency have become even more important in this technological age, they don’t necessarily go hand in hand. There are no fact checkers on Facebook or Twitter. Information can flow freely to millions, which is both the beauty and the curse of the World Wide Web. It did not take long for people to discover that Joseph Kony was but a minor facet in Uganda’s flowing stream of issues and that much of the funds raised by Invisible Children were allocated towards staff salaries and production costs.

“I think sometimes social media can get people really excited about something that they may not know a lot about. There was a lot of support for KONY at first, but people backed out in a matter of days,” said Elizabeth Phulp, vice president of Invisible Children at UM.

Following the release of the video, she saw no increase of participants at their bi-weekly meetings nor donations from people on campus. This perhaps proved that we make a big to-do about something, but actually do a whole lot of nothing.

While the KONY craze may have faded into history, it did show that we are not numb to the world’s socioeconomic affairs. Still, if we are so willing to show support for a cause that has no direct relation to us, then we must have the desire and drive to change things in our own backyards, right?

Well, let’s look at what the Occupy movement accomplished. It swept the nation, mobilizing thousands of people in cities all across the country. It spread its wings far beyond Wall Street and even settled here in Miami. Protesters shared their experiences by the minute, creating blogs to tell their stories and tweet and tumble what they heard and saw. For the 99 percent, social media was the ultimate tool of expression. It allowed people across state borders to share ideas and inspiration, and to educate and mobilize believers to meet and discuss a plan of action. It is also a medium with no hierarchy, which resonates with Occupy’s core beliefs.

“The interesting part about Occupy Miami and Wall Street is that it was based on the premise of being a leaderless movement, which is what made it so unique. The premise of the movement is that there is a move towards a horizontal platform of leadership, meaning that everything is decided through democratic means,” said Kristyn Greco, a senior who has been involved with Occupy.

It was supposed to be the movement of our generation, fighting for the causes that directly affected our age group: income disparities, excessive student loans and a hardly existent job market. Yet it dwindled almost as quickly as it began. These are supposed to be the issues our generation cared about, yet why do people still question what the movement stood for?

“It’s amazing how easily Facebook, Twitter and all the myriad of other agitators can get huge numbers of people going over something, actually doing something,” said John Wilcock who, as co-founder of New York’s most famed underground paper in the 60s, The Village Voice, has seen quite the number of movements. “But most of these things appear to me to be pretty trivial. They’re not going to change anything much, if at all. Strong characters with strong persistent voices make things happen and you could make a case for saying that sometimes large numbers of participants actually dilute the cause -whatever it may be.”

Occupy succeeded in raising awareness of an issue in our country, however, it failed in one thing: structure. And while a pure democracy may succeed with a small group of people, trying to organize millions over chat rooms and comment threads with no official director is impossible. The message got lost within sheer numbers. There were too many cooks, but no kitchen.

As Occupy and KONY proved, social media is a powerful tool for raising the awareness of a cause. Just look at the 2008 election, which marked the first campaign where the use of social media closely paralleled that of traditional media. It was the start of a new way of campaigning: speaking with voters, not to them. No other campaign team understood that more than Barack Obama’s, which found that the only way to get the young vote would be to find them where they were hiding: behind a computer screen. In fact, according to a study done by the PEW Research Center for the People and the Press, 66 percent of voters between 18 and 29 voted for Obama, whereas only 31 percent voted for McCain.

Social media is instant, easy and free. Best of all, you don’t need to leave your house in order to make a difference. You can make a donation with the click of a button, having just enough time to return to your kitchen before your toast burns.

But perhaps that is the problem with social media - the ease with which we can help.

We can access facts, yet we can’t seem to access each other.

Networking works only for causes that require low involvement, where the maximum amount of effort is simply grabbing a credit card and clicking a payment button. Hell, if you could make a dent in a cause without even having to put pants on, why would you bother to do more?

“It takes a lot for people to engage and commit themselves to take action on political and moral issues,” Rudd said. “Generally one does so, not as an individual, but because your friends and family bolster you. If those strong group ties can be developed via digital contact, fine.  But I also think people need to sit and talk and learn to trust each other and develop mutual courage.”

It’s hard to say whether or not technology has pushed our society forward or if it has held us back. We can access facts, yet we can’t seem to access each other. Sure, we show support for friends when they ask us to like a page, but are we really supporting their cause when the maximum effort we give is a trackpad click? We place importance on what we see mentioned and hashtagged, but do we care enough to know the facts before we retweet it?

We seem to have forgotten how to connect in the most important of ways- personally. The protesters of Columbia 1968 didn’t have the facility of Reddit communities to share ideas or group chats to spread information. Their tool was face-to-face conversation. And while their message may not have reached the masses at lightning speed, it was that extra effort to form connections that gave their mission a backbone.

A lot is said, but no one is talking and even fewer are doing. Let’s close the laptops and raise the picket signs. Drop the smartphones and see the road ahead. Differences aren’t made by a couple of texts, especially when messages have such a short shelf life. Let’s be more than just a digital generation, because if that’s all we are, we better hope our batteries don’t run out.