palotin
26th November 2011, 06:37
This topic is perhaps a bit behind the times now that so many occupations have been systematically evicted. Still relevant for my purposes anyway. I've been most involved with Occupy Denver, which only had tents up for a brief stretch before an early and experimental police sweep. This past weekend I was in Montreal and visited the only other occupation I've seen first hand. It blew me away and was much larger and better organized than the Denver effort. Getting a firm tent count was a bit tricky, but something on the order of 200 it looked like.
This kind of organizing work has been very insular. What relationships we've cultivated with other groups tend to be highly personal, beyond trivial statements of solidarity. And the hypermediated dimension of the occupy experience, while facilitating communication, tends to follow a social networking logic of self-cultivation through contextless images and declarations.
At this point, I want to know just basic information about the different occupations out there and what was wiped out over the past two weeks. I don't think strength is reducible to the bare number of participants, but facts and figures give us an important point of orientation and I haven't seen that information aggregated anywhere. What occupations currently have tents up? How many tents do they have? What is the average number of tents? We might ask the same question about the number of 24 hour occupiers. Or even the average numbers attending General Assemblies each day. If I've missed an obvious source for this kind of information, please let me know.
This kind of organizing work has been very insular. What relationships we've cultivated with other groups tend to be highly personal, beyond trivial statements of solidarity. And the hypermediated dimension of the occupy experience, while facilitating communication, tends to follow a social networking logic of self-cultivation through contextless images and declarations.
At this point, I want to know just basic information about the different occupations out there and what was wiped out over the past two weeks. I don't think strength is reducible to the bare number of participants, but facts and figures give us an important point of orientation and I haven't seen that information aggregated anywhere. What occupations currently have tents up? How many tents do they have? What is the average number of tents? We might ask the same question about the number of 24 hour occupiers. Or even the average numbers attending General Assemblies each day. If I've missed an obvious source for this kind of information, please let me know.