“Why has Tumblr become the go-to platform of this moment? As we saw in Iran, Twitter can be a powerful broadcast tool for delivering minute-by-minute accounts of breaking news and amplifying concrete messages (“Down with Ahmedinejad”). And in Egypt, Facebook was pivotal for recruiting protesters and scheduling rallies in Tahrir Square. But Tumblr has served neither of these purposes for Occupy Wall Street, a diffuse and leaderless movement with a deliberately undefined goal. Instead, Tumblr has humanized the movement. Tumblr is a powerful storytelling medium, and this movement is about stories—about how the nation’s economic policies have priced us out of school, swallowed us in debt, permanently postponed retirements, and torn apart families. We Are the 99 Percent is the closest thing we’ve had to the work of Farm Security Administration—which paid photojournalists to document the plight of farmers during the Great Depression—and it may well go down as the definitive social history of this recession.”

Is Occupy Wall Street the Tumblr Revolution? - Technology - GOOD
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laphamsquarterly: A few former LQ editors have started a Tumblr for historical presidents for Occupy Wall Street. It is still a small and humble endeavor, so feel free to submit your historical readings that illuminate the OWS movement.  occupyhistory: 1928, RUSSIA One day at a worker-correspondent meeting, we were arguing about how to describe workers’ lives. The question is tremendously important to us rabkors [correspondents] because we’ve never read a description of our life nowadays as workers that was broad or complete. True, you run across individual bits and scraps of worker life in the newspapers. Sometimes our life is described so that workers live like the bourgeoisie used to, or sometimes so that our life is flat-out filth. These descriptions really upset us. We’re furious at the writers and, of course, even more so at ourselves. Who the hell knows what’s going on! Some people don’t know how we live, but they write. We do know, but writing is beyond us. We could just cry! That’s why we decided to get together and figure out how to describe our lives ourselves. Ivan Zhiga, from The Thoughts, Cares, and Deeds of the Workers. Initiated by Vladimir Lenin, the worker-correspondent, or “rabkor” program, was developed in the 1920s as a means to reveal corruption and to provide the proletariat with a voice of their own. (via Lapham’s Quarterly) Today in Occupations.

laphamsquarterly:

A few former LQ editors have started a Tumblr for historical presidents for Occupy Wall Street. It is still a small and humble endeavor, so feel free to submit your historical readings that illuminate the OWS movement. 

occupyhistory:

1928, RUSSIA

One day at a worker-correspondent meeting, we were arguing about how to describe workers’ lives. The question is tremendously important to us rabkors [correspondents] because we’ve never read a description of our life nowadays as workers that was broad or complete.

True, you run across individual bits and scraps of worker life in the newspapers. Sometimes our life is described so that workers live like the bourgeoisie used to, or sometimes so that our life is flat-out filth.

These descriptions really upset us. We’re furious at the writers and, of course, even more so at ourselves. Who the hell knows what’s going on! Some people don’t know how we live, but they write. We do know, but writing is beyond us. We could just cry! That’s why we decided to get together and figure out how to describe our lives ourselves.

Ivan Zhiga, from The Thoughts, Cares, and Deeds of the Workers. Initiated by Vladimir Lenin, the worker-correspondent, or “rabkor” program, was developed in the 1920s as a means to reveal corruption and to provide the proletariat with a voice of their own. (via Lapham’s Quarterly)

Today in Occupations.

“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,” and all it’s doing is posting grainy pictures of people holding handwritten signs telling their stories, one after the other.”

Who are the 99 percent? - The Washington Post

Nice bit from Ezra Klein on a Tumblr you should be following.

  • Washington Post