viz.

Image Credit: Screenshot capture of photograph by Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

The photograph above was featured this week in The L.A. Times' coverage of the Occupy Wall Steet movement's one-year anniversary. The caption provided beneath the photo states, "A man wanting to join the Occupy protesters on Monday is told to leave Wall Street." The image gives pause, not because a policeman is pictured confronting a protester, but because the man's ethos seems incongruous with that of the anarchist-inspired OWS movement. My recollection of the "Occupied" zone in downtown Austin last winter calls to mind the image of a different kind of a protester, one who looks as committed to battling the elements as he is to changing the status quo.  This unidentified man, however, does not look prepared for the scene of mayhem he is allegedly trying to enter. With a cigarette balanced precariously atop his coffee cup, he looks like he's just popped down from the 20th floor to grab some more uppers. It's amusing (or disheartening, depending on your outlook) to imagine him scrawling "99%>1%" on a scrap of paper before venturing into the mob that separates him from the nearest Starbucks. But this is pure speculation. It's equally likely that the man in the photograph is an overworked reporter, or an analyst who has thousands of dollars of debt from student loans. Perhaps he was walking by the OWS demonstration, got inspired, and decided to join on a whim.  Either way, the photographer caught him looking weary, unimpassioned, and in a moment of half-hearted negotiation with the police, which is why this photo provides a useful illustration of the phenomenon known as slacktivism.

Image Credit: nomnomclub.com

The Starbucks Christmas cups have been out in full force for what seems like several weeks, although I’ve delayed writing about them until after Thanksgiving. If last year is any measure, I should be writing about these cups at exactly the right moment. Last year, at the Starbucks in and around UT’s campus, their coffees reverted to the boring white cups nearly a full week before Christmas. Whereas the area’s students had gotten in the mood for Christmas well in advance of Thanksgiving, at the exact moment they were turning in the last of their final papers, at the exact moment when responsible students might let their thoughts drift towards dreams of sugar plum ferries, Yuletide cheer vanished from the cups of their gingerbread lattes. This strange vanishing has made me suspicious of Starbucks’ holiday cups.

Image: Screenshot from occupyaustin.org

If you couldn't tell from the past few days of viz.'s coverage, the Occupy Austin protests continue, if attendance has mildly abated from this weekend's high.  This blog is not an appropriate venue for the discussion of the movement’s goals (you can find more intelligent discussion about Austin’s own version of the movement here and here).  However, I am interested in the ways in which the Occupy Austin movement represents its constituents.  The Occupy Wall Street / Austin brief—which aspires to represent 99% of the American (some Austin material intransigently claims “world”)  populace—faces a particularly clear set of representational challenges even as social networking allows its images to proliferate in ways unimaginable even five years ago.  For the rest of this post, I’ll highlight some images from Occupy Austin’s affiliated website.  

Image Credit: Marjorie Foley

Last Thursday afternoon, I borrowed a video camera from the Digital Writing and Research Lab and headed down to Occupy Austin, a gathering intended to stand in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. If you've been following the media coverage of Occupy Wall Street, then you know that people are confused about what exactly it is the protesters in New York want, and in Austin it doesn't seem to be much different.

(Image Credit: Michael Nagle, Getty Images via In Focus)

During the past week Occupy Wall Street has gained increasing media attention. The movement, initially called for by the group Adbusters, began in earnest on September 17th when protesters first began to occupy Zuccotti Park. This initial act seems to have largely been met with bemused ambivalence, and while there was originally a single demand articulated by Adbusters in their July call to action—that “Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington”  (Adbusters) –things were quite murky by the time the occupation took shape. Much of the media attention that the movement has gained, especially during this surge in participation, has focused on the apparent lack of concrete demands set forth by OWS. This confusion is misplaced. While the list of hopeful outcomes is amorphous a clear sense of oppositional branding has been developed   from the wealth of signs and images created through the movement. OWS demands that we put a hold on our love affair with notions of prosperity that put us in a double bind.