Castells– Occupy Wall Street was born digital. The cry of outrage and the call to occupy came from various blogs, and was posted on Facebook and spread by Twitter….In a telling comment, Ezra Klein wrote in The Washington Post: “It’s not the arrests that convinced me that “Occupy Wall Street” was worth covering seriously. Nor was it their press strategy, which largely consisted of tweeting journalists to cover a small protest that couldn’t say what, exactly, it hoped to achieve. It was a Tumblr called “We Are The 99 Percent.”
Literally– This passage explains that Occupy Wall Street was created due to the internet and social media. #Occupywallstreet was created, which linked to it’s Facebook page to garner interest. This hashtag sparked and was soon spread all over the internet to the point where people did act upon it. The 99 percent aspect of occupy wall street was later popularized by Chris and Priscilla Grim with their page “We Are The 99%.” It shows how a movement of such a grand scale was able to come to fruition from one single hashtag.
Intellectually– I knew virtually nothing about Occupy Wall Street before reading this passage so I had no idea about it had begun. It made me realize how powerful the internet has become, that we able to create something on such a grand scale from a device at home, work, or that we carry around in our pockets. The intentions of the developers of these websites couldn’t have accounted for something like this. That we would be able to latch on to some words on a computer screen and create an entire movement. It could be anything someone puts from anywhere around the world, someone else will see it, share it and it will begin to spread until someone or a group decide to act upon it. Luckily, for the most part, Occupy Wall Street was peaceful, imagine if it was a call to arms? We are all carrying a weapon on us, something that can potentially be far worse than a gun.
Emotionally– The passage describes how a Tumblr page humanized the movement, how Twitter was a powerful broadcast tool in Iran and Facebook was pivotal in Egypt to recruit protesters and amplifying messages. I feel like this is finally allowing people to be able to come together and unify in a way we couldn’t have thought possible before. Spreading these ideas by word of mouth and letters would’ve take far too long but, being able to spread our thoughts, ideas on a place we can all see, at an instant in some cases, is an powerful tool to add to our arsenal.
Mumford– Before going any further with this problem, let me first challenge the notion that automation is in any sense a final good….Organic and human modes of behavior are infinitely more complex than automatic systems; and what makes so is the margin of choice, the freedom to commit and correct errors, to explore unfrequented paths, to incorporate unpredictable paths with self-defined purposes, to anticipate the unexpected and to “plan the impossible.”
Literally– Here, Mumford discusses how complex humans can be. That we are able to think and make mistakes of our accord, we can learn and adapt to situations, or attempt something that we might not be able to do. These are things that automation cannot do, they have one method to get their job done and if that fails, the system malfunctions. They cannot think and say, this isn’t working so I’ll try another method and when that fails to think of another. They may be complex in their creation but humans are ultimately more complex in the end.
Intellectually– I need only to think of calling any customer service number with a machine on the other end. I need to ask a specific questions but the machine only has some things it can answer or if I input something wrong, it won’t know what to do. In the end, speaking to a person is still better, at least you can talk, respond and argue with a person, the machine will just not be able to go beyond the confines of it’s programming.
Emotionally– As humans we can make our choices and decisions, instead of having a one minded approach to situations. We can think outside of the box and let our emotions guide us to the right approach. We are flawed but that’s what makes us unique and powerful, we can lose, get up and try again with a different method. We have the ability to think for ourselves and an automated system cannot, at least, until the day we create a system that can. However, would that still be automated system anymore?
