Open Access Journal

ISSN: 2183-2439

Article | Open Access

Forgetting History: Mediated Reflections on Occupy Wall Street

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Abstract:  This study examines how Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protestors’ practices and stated understanding of media act on social perceptions of networked media. It stems from a discursive content analysis of online commentary from OWS protestors and supporters, using different sources from the first Adbusters blog in July 2011 until May 2012. We demonstrate how the belief in the myth of an egalitarian Internet was incorporated into the offline structure of OWS and led OWS participants to adopt rhetoric that distances the movement from past protest actions by stating the movement was “like the Internet”.

Keywords:  discursive content analysis; media logic; mediatisation; Occupy Wall Street; protest movement

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v5i3.979


© Michael S. Daubs, Jeffrey Wimmer. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.