COMM 150 and 337: le plus de pepper spray cop photo meme, le plus de meme chose?

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose [the more it changes, the more it is the same thing]." ~ French proverb.

Even after a week that included a major holiday, the commentary on the pepper spraying of students Nov. 18 at the University of California Davis doesn't look like it's going away. Witness an article on the Nieman Journalism Lab's website at Harvard University. Written by assistant editor Megan Garber, it's titled "Image as Interest: How the Pepper Spray Cop could change the trajectory of Occupy Wall Street." If that sounds kind of pretentious, well, that's the way some people talk at Harvard. But what's happening with the iconic cop's picture seems to be real.

Posted five days ago at the beginning of the week, Garber's article about the cop photo keeps drawing attention (at week's end it had 900-plus Tweets, more than any other story on the Harvard lab's homepage. Especially with the financial crisis deepening in Europe, as Belgium's credit rating was downgraded and a German bond offering didn't find enough buyers, the incident at UC Davis may even suggest we're approaching a kind of economic tipping point.

(For background on the crisis in Europe, plus another iconic photo of a sculpture outside the stock exchange in Milan, Italy, see Friday's issue of The Guardian.)

Graber's article tracks media coverage of the Nov. 18 incident in which campus police Lt. James Pike tried to disperse a student demonstration against an $8,000 tuition hike with pepper spray. It made headlines nationwide, and pictures of the cop spraying the students went viral on the internet. Her analysis is very technical, suggesting that "trending topics algorithms ... reward discrete events over ongoing movements, favoring spikes over steadiness, effectively punishing trends that build, gradually, over time." In plain language, that means the news media like to cover one-time dramatic events.

But Graber says the pepper spray incident at UC Davis may change that, because the pictures are so compelling. She says:

This weekend [Nov. 19-20], a series of photographs — images of a riot-gear-wearing cop shooting a group of students in the face with pepper spray — made their transition from journalistic documents to sources of outrage to, soon enough, Official Internet Meme. Perhaps the most iconic image (taken by UC Davis student Brian Nguyen, and shown above) isn’t explicitly political; instead, it captures a moment of violence and resistance in almost allegoric dimensions: the solidarity of the students versus the singularity of the cop in question, Lt. Pike; their steely resolve versus his sauntering nonchalance; the panic of the observers, gathered chorus-like and open-mouthed at the edges of the frame. The human figures here are layered, classified, distant from each other: cops, protestors, observers, each occupying distinct spaces — physical, psychical, moral — within the image’s landscape.

As James Fallows put it, “You don’t have to idealize everything about them or the Occupy movement to recognize this as a moral drama that the protestors clearly won.”

Graber compares the UC Davis pictures to pictures like the young Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack on her village during the 1960s or the Chinese protestor standing up to a row of tanks in 1989. She said she can't predict whether the pepper spray cop pictures will still be looked at 20 years or 50 years from now like those pictures are, but at least for the moment it looks like it's going to be important:

The image of Pike (nom de meme: the Pepper Spray Cop) isn’t the first to reach a kind of iconic status when it comes to Occupy Wall Street. (It’s not even the first to involve pepper spray. See, for example, the horrific image of 84-year-old Dorli Rainey, her face dripping with burn-assuaging milk after being sprayed in Seattle.) But it is the first whose implicit narrative — one of struggle, one of outrage — offers viewers a kind of ethical, and tacitly emotional, participation in Occupy Wall Street. A moral drama that the protestors clearly won. Images, Susan Sontag argued, are “invitations” — “to deduction, speculation, fantasy.” They invite empathy, and, with it, [emotional] investment.

It remains to be seen whether Pepper Spray Cop, as a singular image and a collection of derivatives, will prove enduring in the way that previous iconic photos — Phan Thi Kim Phúc, Tank Man — have done. But Pepper Spray Cop, and his ad hoc iconography, is a telling case study for observing what happens when political images become, in the social setting of non-traditional media, de- and then re-politicized. And it will be interesting to see whether the image’s viral life will affect David Carr’s question of “what’s next” for Occupy Wall Street in the world of traditional media. “Just a week ago,” NPR noted this morning, “it was starting to seem like the Occupy movement might be running short of fuel.” But “now that movement seems to have fresh energy after a week of police crackdowns across the country.”

Nieman Journalism Lab is a project of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Its website says: "The Nieman Journalism Lab is an attempt to help journalism figure out its future in an Internet age. ... We want to help reporters and editors adjust to their online labors; we want to help traditional news organizations find a way to survive; we want to help the new crop of startups that will complement — or supplant — them."

Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Lab. She was formerly a staff writer at the Columbia Journalism Review, where she reported on the future of news for CJR.org’s News Frontier section. A winner of a Mirror Award for media coverage, Garber also served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. According to her profile on the website, she "plays a quartzy game of Scrabble."