Archiving Dissent: Community, Memory, and the Afterlife of Occupy

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Abstract

This paper attempts to grapple with the protest afterlife of “Occupy,” one of the most important social movements of the 21st century. Seven years after the initial wave of Occupy protests, affiliate organizations such as Occupy SEC, which monitors financial regulation and lobbies for progressive change to unfair economic practices, and the Debt Collective, which advocates for collective debt relief, represent the soft institutionalization of the movement’s strategic agenda. Occupy’s famous rallying cry “We are the 99 percent” continues to resonate with contemporary social justice movements such as the 2014 Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong. Today, the disparate community of activists, artists, and journalists that constitute Occupy persist primarily on two websites: Occupy.com and the Occupy Commons. This paper aims to examine Occupy’s resonance as a brand, meme, and community in our contemporary media environment. Using a methodology developed to analyze both the rhetorical content and functionality of websites, we ask two primary research questions: 1) How do these websites help constitute a community? And 2) How does this community remember Occupy? Conceptualizing Occupy as a sociotechnical phenomenon, the paper argues that these websites represent the collective memory of Occupy and that it sustains because of the technological affordances of its long tail — the fragmented multiplicity of frames, memes, voices, technologies, and techniques that continue to be utilized by social movements today. The paper has important implications for scholars interested in how communities of dissent endure on seemingly ephemeral technologies such as social media and other digital platforms

Authors

• Patrick Jones, University of Oregon

• Laura E Strait, University of Oregon