 action & events Support Independent Reporting: #OccupyWallStreet Since Sunday, September 18th, I have been working with a group of alt.media professionals to bring you live streaming video from the #OccupyWallStreet protests in New York City. Since #OccupyWallStreet began, until October 1st, the media team served 2.8 million live video streams to 690,000 people—68% in US! By October 12th, these figures have risen to more than 7 million video streams served to more than 2 million unique visitors. Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com On Saturday, September 17th, protesters converged on Wall Street for a protest against the corrupt heart of the American financial empire. The event had begun with a concept touted months before by Adbusters magazine, was subsequently and unexpectedly promoted widely by the members of the hacker collective Anonymous, and in the end attracted a variety of protesters which didn't really fit into either mold. After the Saturday march on Wall Street of several thousand people, the protesters set up camp in Zuccotti Park, which is still widely known in NYC by its former name of Liberty Plaza, renamed it Liberty Park, and stayed. Surrounded by a ring of police, the protesters have been subjected to nonsense arrests for noncrimes such as chalking sidewalks and holding tarpaulins over computer equipment during rain, thus breaking a "tent" ordinance. The last week has seen the NYPD at its classiest. :-) A media team for the event came together at the last minute—as vapors and moisture quickly form unexpected clouds—comprised of members of Mobile Broadcast News, Glassbead Collective, Twin Cities Indymedia, and myself—the alt.media ninjas that brought you the Terrorizing Dissent and Democracy 101 documentaries. On the ground, a chaotic and stressful situation focuses the media team by necessity on the rapidly changing situation and basic equipment maintenance. My role, from Pittsburgh, is a remote producer. Together with two more remote producers in Minneapolis, we cover a news cycle that begins at dawn and ends long after darkness falls in NYC. The channel we broadcast on is called Global Revolution, a mixture of live video coverage and reedited stories and clips from the #OccupyWallStreet protests. We professionalize the broadcast by giving on-screen context through text overlays and crawl text, fact checking, mixing multi-camera live footage, and playing archived footage shot at the protests and related clips. Since Saturday, viewership of the channel has varied from 1,500 to nearly 8,000 at any given time, depending on the time of day or night, and if there are breaking news-type events happening on the ground. Last night, as a march honoring Troy Davies—executed in Georgia on Wednesday night—came to Liberty Park, gathered people from there, and headed for Wall Street, I mixed live video from two cameras in the streets of New York City from Pittsburgh as police and protesters scuffled. 8 were arrested. The names of the arrestees and the telephone numbers of the precincts they were taken to were added to the live broadcast within minutes. Phonecalls demanding their release flooded in. This is raw activist TV at its most compelling, and has attracted an international viewership that has stuck with the developing story for almost a whole week now. In the channel chat room people organize support, equipment, skills and other manifestations of solidarity. We have the capacity these days to stream live footage around the world and engage a global activist community in what is happening in a tiny park in New York City. This is a role of the Internet that I have long dreamt of. These tens of thousands of viewers have been able to watch every (often excruciating!) detail of the people's assemblies in the park—the decision-making process by which activists are deciding the direction of their rolling protest. It is a fascinating insight into democracy in action. And transparency has a number of side-effects. For sure, the presence of the live streaming video crew has prevented police from being overly aggressive in the park. It seems self-evident police know who the on-the-ground media team are, and what appear to be federal agents have been reported to be trailing team members around the city as they go home to rest or get equipment. It's a strange and upsetting reality. Today, as I spoke with one of the media team organizers in the park on the phone, he reported that police cameramen were trying to film his keyboard as he typed, in what could only presumably be an attempt to illegally get access to personal accounts. Surrounded by police videographers, he communicated a password I needed to know by typing it on encrypted chat under a blanket. If you've never seen police targeting independent journalists during protest events, it is quite the education about how free the country you live in really isn't. Whatever the #OccupyWallStreet protest results in, I suspect in the coming days that we will see the arm of the state revealed in other ways that are going to be hard—but necessary—to watch. One member of our media team has already been arrested, since released. It is at times like this that I am glad for my experience of running independent media projects on the ground in Palestine, and the later experience—in the years after I left Palestine in 1998—of creating and managing alternative media windows into the civilian experience of wars in the Middle East through projects like Electronic Intifada, Electronic Iraq and Electronic Lebanon. Whatever you think about the birth of the #OccupyWallStreet protest, its initial promoters, or the people who first gathered at Liberty Park in downtown Manhattan, a few blocks from the heart of America's financial empire, it is clear that this is a messy and powerful experiment in direct democracy. More are joining them every day, and chat rooms are bubbling as people organize car pools or send whatever support they can. Seeing the young people in the park figuring out how to circumvent megaphone bans (they implemented a "human megaphone" in which multiple people at gatherings repeat the sentences of a speaker so that everyone can hear) or debating how to run their nonviolent and principled protest is a thrilling thing. Most youth in this country spend their lives in far less productive ways. This exciting sign of the times is worthy of our attention and respect. The experiment in live TV—usually the domain of commercial media empires—is creating an activist media model that is powerful and game-changing. With your help, I'd like to keep doing my part to archive this moment in history and work with the team on the ground to bring you live coverage of this nascent movement. Creating these models and pioneering alternative media strategies is something, I believe important to support. If you can help, please donate. Every little bit helps. Thank you. Nigel Parry nigelparry.com WATCH GLOBAL REVOLUTION'S COVERAGE & DONATE HERE: http://nigelparry.com/photos/global-revolution-occupy-wall-street.shtml |