Occupy Wall Street is decentralized and leaderless. It is a movement started and directed, almost exclusively, through means of the internet and social media. Protesters aim to deconstruct the corporate structure of America because, in their own words, “One percent of the country owns ninety-nine percent of the wealth”. It is also a movement that was started by the simple hashtag: #OccupyWallStreet.
On July 13, an activist group called Adbusters mentioned the idea to #OccupyWallStreet in a blog post, hinting at the absurdity of such a lofty idea. A week later, a Costa Rican film maker named Francisco Guerrero against posted the idea to #OccupyWallStreet on Twitter. He linked to a blog post on a site called “Wake Up From Your Slumber” and called readers to action.
Guerrero’s post was retweeted only once. This trend continued slowly. A few people would post and a few other would retweet the original #OccupyWallStreet tweet. After all, it was an absurdly unrealistic idea.
The #OccupyWallStreet movement gained little attention until, suddenly, it blew up. This can be attributed to what experts call “hyper-local tweeters”, or twitter accounts that have more pull than most local newspapers. Much of #OccupyWallStreet’s popularity can be attributed to the twitter account “Newyorkist”, which has over 11,000 tweets to date.
#OccupyWallStreet began to trend on September 16 around 11 pm. Within 24 hours the hashtag was found in 1 of every 500 uses of a hashtag. By September 22, demonstrations were taking place, a Facebook page had been started supporting the resistance and the movement was unstoppable.
For a generation who grew up with the internet, laptops and smartphones, social media is crucial in the expansion of movements like Occupy Wall Street. Sometimes, all it really takes to start a revolution is one little #hashtag.