how do you know you are winning? a judge speaks

How you know you are winning -- When a judge speaks

9/27/2011 RT @TheNewDeal: How Many Wall Street Bankers Were Arrested by NYPD After Destroying Our Economy? None. They Were Rewarded $700 Billion #OccupyWallStreet #p2

9/28/2011 RT @ileducprof: It "boggles the mind" that #OccupyWallStreet protesters are being arrested when no #WallStreet bankers have been arrested, says @MMFlint.

9/28/2011 RT @Min_Reyes: RT @madelinevo 100 protesters were arrested but not bankers who destroyed economy, says Michael Moore http://t.co/4MPpLg8I #occupywallstreet

9/29/2011 RT @billgcta: 100+ protestors arrested at #OCCUPYWALLSTREET. 0 bankers arrested for financial collapse. This is just wrong! #WeAreOne #union #labor

9/29/2011 Oh the irony that cops are arresting protesters up and down the street, yet not one financial executive has been arrested #OccupyWallStreet

10/1/2011 RT @newsy: Number of bankers arrested for tanking the economy: 0. Number of people arrested for protesting: 700+. #OccupyWallStreet

10/8/2011 RT @TheNewDeal: 0 Bankers Were Arrested After Purposely Crashing Our Economy. Nearly 1,000 Have Been Arrested for Speaking Up About it. #OccupyWallStreet

10/21/2011 RT @TheNewDeal: 0 Bankers Were Arrested After Purposely Crashing Our Economy. Over 1,000 Protesters Have Been Arrested for Speaking Up About it. #OWS

11/15/2011 RT @SocialistViews: 3,701 #Occupy protesters arrested so far, 0 bankers. This is what a class society looks like #ows #capitalism #socialism

11/16/2011 RT @allisonkilkenny: RT @OccupyArrests: Including today's 118 #occupyarrests global total now 4167 #OWS // 0 Bankers.

First arrests, then 100 arrested, then 100+ arrested, then 700+ arrested, then nearly 1,000, then more than 1,000, then 3,701 arrested, then 4,167. And the arrests go on in LA, 200+, and Philadelphia, 50, and on and on. (Associated Press, November 30, 2011) And still no bankers arrested.

Then a judge spoke. Money is not enough, he said. They must acknowledge what they did. The judge was U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff. And this is what he said

Rakoff also slammed the SEC for following its standard practice of allowing defendants to settle charges without admitting or denying wrongdoing.

Some “apologists” may favor “suppressing or obscuring the truth,” Rakoff wrote. “But the S.E.C., of all agencies, has a duty . . . to see that the truth emerges; and if it fails to do so, this Court must not, in the name of deference or convenience, grant judicial enforcement to the agency’s contrivances.”

The court “concludes, regretfully, that the proposed Consent Judgment is neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest,” he wrote. (Washington Post, November 29, 2011)

What they have done must become public knowledge. They must bear the public shame for what they have done. Maybe even some jail time.

If you were #OccupyWallStreet would you believe you were winning?

To answer is to get to the point. #OccupyWallStreet and all of the 'occupy togethers' are engaged in a culture war. They are attacking a culture that developed over the last 30 or 40 years in which what counts is wealth. The wealthy have arranged the financial world in ways that let them get richer faster than anyone else and faster than ever before. And it is not just bankers; the gap between CEOs and workers is many times greater in the U.S. than anywhere else.(Gilson and Perot, March/April 2011, Eichler and McAuliff, December 1, 2011) And they feel quite confident that it is as it should be. The confidence can hardly be missed when a presidential candidate can say "if you are not rich something is wrong with you." (thinkprogress.org, October 5, 2011) And that was the beginning of his assent as a candidate for the Republican nomination. And politics is incorporated into the 1%. All members of the Senate are millionaires. All members of the House are or shortly will be millionaires. Dick Cheney led the way with his $35 million golden parachute, when a million dollars was 'real' money, so he could become vice president. And Newt Gingrich can become a hundreds of million dollar industry. And the most characteristic act of political campaigning is asking for money. Money talks. We need more than they do. I need to raise $1 billion for this election. You do not need people. You need money so you can 'buy' people. That is what the culture has become. That is what #OccupyWallStreet is attacking.

And finally a judge said money is not enough. Perhaps, a very small crack in the culture.

Methodological note

First, this is another in a series about what one should notice as signs that the occupy protest movement is making a difference. That involves a claim about what would count as success. And it involves noting changes in politics and society that bring the culture closer to what they would like it to be.

In this case, I wanted to track a theme that was particularly prevalent in the first weeks of the #OccupyWallStreet protests. And I wanted to present it with the force it had for the protesters, which is why it is written in the form above. With that theme as context one can draw a conclusion about how the judge's ruling becomes part of the change they would like to bring about.

Here I would like to show how that theme developed. Some of the twitter messages were repeated often, and it is that repetition/spread that I will examine.

The twitter messages that was repeated far more than any other in this strand of messages was

RT @TheNewDeal: 0 Bankers Were Arrested After Purposely Crashing Our Economy. Nearly 1,000 Have Been Arrested for Speaking Up About it. #OccupyWallStreet

It first appeared at 10:29 pm on October 1. The figure shows the number of times it was retweeted for the next 17 days, which was when it essentially disappeared. Between 10:29 pm and midnight it was retweeted 358 times. The next day it surged to 4,215 messages. After that it fell in a monotonic fashion.

Retweeting is generally a quick and brief spurt of messages. Sysmos found that 92.4% of all retweets are posted in the first hour. (Sysmos September 2010) Note how different this pattern is. In the first hour the message was retweeted 287 times. That is 3.2% of the 8,794 retweets of this message. Even the big day, November 2 with 4,215 retweets, is just under half of the total. It took 9 days for the cumulative total to equal 92% of the total.

This message had staying power that is completely different than the norm.

This was clearly a theme that resonated with its audience. But it is also important to look at the construction of the audience. The original message was posted by @TheNewDeal. @TheNewDeal is something of a personage in U.S. political Twitter messaging. He has 19,643 followers (12/01/2011, the numbers change every day). He has posted 37,992 messages. His followers are prone to retweet his messages. In the first ten days of October there were 26,960 retweets of his Twitter posts. If you subtract all of the retweets of the "0 bankers" message the total retweets was 18,657. His other posts were retweeted an average of 1,866 times a day. Had I, with 113 followers who are not prone to retweet my messages, been the person posting the "0 bankers" message it would have died a quick 'death.'

Audience is not only the followers of @TheNewDeal. The people who retweeted his post also have followers, and their followers become the audience as well. @TheNewDeal has 19,643 followers. The first ten minutes the message was retweeted 94 times. The followers of the persons who retweeted 94 times numbered 35,785. On the basis of the original post and the activity of the first ten minutes the message was available to 55,428 persons. That is only the first ten minutes. We do not know how much redundancy there is in the 55,428 number. If the persons retweeting had the same followers then instead of 55,428 persons each person would have received 94 copies of the message. For a comparison see "Audience: the reach of political messaging on Twitter (Boynton, October 17, 2010) The forays I have made into determining redundancy in follower networks suggests that 4% redundancy is roughly what you find. (Boynton, 2010) That would mean almost all of the 55,428 are different individuals and not people receiving the same message from many persons they follow.

The message resonated with its audience in a way that far exceeded the norm in both numbers and in length of time it reappeared. That is important. It is also important how the audience is constructed. @TheNewDeal has built an audience with many, clever posts to Twitter. He has followers who retweet his posts. His followers have followers in even larger numbers.

If I wanted to characterize this process what language should I use? There are two popular characterizations for this sort of spread: going viral and it is a meme. Both are about spread. If it is a meme it would be so by virtue of the association between the one strand and the other messages of the same theme. They would be a meme. But we probably need a new construction of 'meme' to use it in the context of Twitter messaging. If it is going viral then it demonstrates that we need a new construction of 'going viral' to use it in the context of Twitter messaging (Boynton, 2011)

References

Associated Press, November 30, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCIGITFLgZ8

Boynton, G. R. (March 16, 2010) Sarah Palin did what? The Importance of Redundancy

Boynton, G. R. (October 17, 2010) Audience: the reach of political messaging on Twitter

Boynton, G. R. (November 4, 2010) Going Viral--In the small

Boynton, G. R. (2011) Now that's going viral: #ScariestWordsEver "President Palin"

Eichler, Alexander and Michael McAuliff (December 1, 2011) Income Inequality Reaches Gilded Age Levels, Congressional Report Finds, HuffPost

Gilson, Dave and Carolyn Perot (March/April 2011) It's the Inequality, Stupid, MotherJones

Hilzenrath, David S. (November 28, 2011) Judge rejects SED-Citigroup settlement, The Washington Post

Seitz-Wald, Alex (October 5, 2011) Herman Cain on Occupy Wall Street: 'If You Don't Have a Job and You're Not Rich, Blame Yourself!', ThinkProgress

Sysmos.com (September 2010) Replies and Retweets on Twitter