COMM 150: Social media links, Occupy UC Davis and a message for students who attend class the day before Thanksgiving

"[W]e few, we happy few, we band of brothers [and sisters] ..."

The Saint Crispin's Day Speech from Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film of the Shakespeare classic Henry V. Just before the Battle of Agincourt, in which a badly outnumbered English army defeated the French on Oct. 25, 1415 (St. Crispin's Day). It is considered one of the most stirring speeches (and quotable) in Shakespeare's history plays. The part that sounds kinda like us begins at 2:38.



So, brothers and sisters, how do we read up on social media for the paper that's due Dec. 2?

I'd Google it. (I Google everything.) For example, I did a search on keywords social media and politics, and turned up this Reuters news service story headlined "Insight: Social media - a political tool for good or evil?" Peter Apps, Political Risk Correspondent (I swear I'm not making up either his name or his title!) said, "After the "Arab Spring" surprised the world with the power of technology to revolutionize political dissent, governments are racing to develop strategies to respond to, and even control, the new player in the political arena -- social media."

On Sept. 29, Apps said, "The United States ... has seen some modest signs of social media-organized protest, with hundreds of protesters occupying Wall Street for days this month in anger at perceived excesses by its banks." Then he added, "In Europe, activists have used similar tools to coordinate mass street unrest, although few expect U.S. disturbances on that scale."

Oops. Hard to keep up with, isn't it?

I'm not even going to try. But it's clear that social media, especially if you include blogs, have been driving the story of the protests at the University of California Davis since they got out of hand last week.

The national media haven't exactly been getting out in front of the story. (Nothing unusual about that. They don't know the turf on local stories that go national.) But a "hyperlocal" news site called DavisPatch.com, at http://davis.patch.com/, has several articles that trace how the situation there began a week ago, with a low-key protest against tuition increases on Tuesday, Nov. 15. It was loosely affiliated with Occupy Davis, part of the #OccupyWallStreet movement - if it's proper to say anything can affiliate with a determinedly leaderless movement.

The next day, Patch editor Justin Cox collected some of the Twitter traffic about a demonstration in a campus building for an article headlined: "Government, The Neighborhood Files, Local ConnectionsSocial Media: Key Tool in Mrak Hall Occupation." Cox said, "the Internet played in heavily," and added, "Much of it was projected online via social media such as Facebook, Twitter and UStream." Blog posts in the Patch more typically concern stories like a runaway ferret, but by the weekend local eighth-grade teacher Jennifer Mason Wolfe was comparing the protests at UC Davis to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.

That was after campus police Lt. John Pike fired what Wolfe called "The (Pepper Spray) Shot Heard Round the World" during an on-campus demonstration Friday.

The first "shot heard 'round the world" was April 15, 1775, when British soldiers fired on minutemen in Concord, Mass., and it was 50 years before Ralph Waldo wrote his poem about it. It only took a few hours for video footage of Pike's shot to go viral. Wolfe said:

Maybe the police didn’t count on the students' ability to fight back with media.

Armed with cell phones and video cameras, our tech-savvy citizens' ability to tweet and harness the power of the web provided them invaluable ammunition to their fight. The cameras do not lie -- they are just another tool for nonviolent protestors to gather their troops and spread the word.

In the meantime, bloggers nationwide have been quick to take up the story. Often they've done better than reporters for newspapers that have decimated their regional bureaus in recent years.

For example, Chicago Theological Seminary professor Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite wrote in the Washington Post's blog On Faith mentioned something I hadn't seen anywhere else. It was how a campus chaplain, the Rev. Kristen Stoneking, and a student negotiated UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi's peaceful exit from campus Sunday after a three-hour standoff outside the administration building.

Thistlethwaite linked to Rev. Stoneking's blog post "Why I walked Chancellor Katehi out of [the administration building] Surge II." Stoneking said she was on her way to an annual meeting of American Academy of Religion in San Francisco, when she got an urgent call from an associate dean saying she was needed back on campus. So she called a student she knows, who confirmed it.

"We turned the car around and headed back to Davis," she said.

Back on campus Stoneking and a student, whom she didn't name, negotiated with Katehi. And something happened that may explain Katehi's apparent about-face on the pepper spray incident:

Before we left, the Chancellor was asked to view a video of the student who was with me being pepper sprayed. She immediately agreed. Then, he and I witnessed her witnessing eight minutes of the violence that occurred Friday. Like a recurring nightmare, the horrific scene and the cries of “You don’t have to do this!” and students choking and screaming rolled again. The student and I then left the building and using the human mike, students were informed that a request had been made that they move to one side and sit down so that the Chancellor could exit. They immediately complied, though I believe she could have left peacefully even without this concession.

Stoneking added:

What was clear to me was that once again, the students’ willingness to show restraint kept us from spiraling into a cycle of violence upon violence. There was no credible threat to the Chancellor, only a perceived one. The situation was not hostile. And what was also clear to me is that whether they admit it or not, the administrators that were inside the building are afraid. And exhausted. And human. And the suffering that has been inflicted is real. The pain present as the three of us watched the video of students being pepper sprayed was palpable. A society is only truly free when all persons take responsibility for their actions; it is only upon taking responsibility that healing can come.

That sounds a little preachy to my ears (hey, Stoneking's a preacher, that's what she does), but it's a perspective I haven't seen in news media coverage.

At any rate, it all shows the power of an amateur video that went viral. And a demonstration of the power of blogging, as Stoneking's post from the perspective of somebody who helped shape the event in Davis, Calif., got picked up by a seminary professor in Chicago and relayed to a blog on the Washington Post website an entire continent away.