Occupy Wall Street Essay

1505 Words4 Pages

FROM WEB TO STREET: OCCUPY WALL STREET AND 2014 HONG KONG PROTESTS
—A QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH OF NEW MEDIA IN SOCIAL ACTIVISM
Yihong (Steven) Li
Instructor: Prof. Arely Zimmerman
Introduction:
It is generally acknowledged that new media plays an important role in participatory politics and social activism. However, it remains ambivalent to what extent new media engages social change. Existing debates and researches approach the problem from broad generalizations and have drawn different conclusions. My objective is to examine the significance of new media engaging social change quantitatively and eventually define the role new media plays in social activism. I further aim to apply the conclusion to predict future developments in 2014 Hong Kong protests.
I choose the cases of Occupy Wall Street (2011) and 2014 Hong Kong protests for their representativeness, both featuring youth participatory politics and active involvement by new media and social network. Occupy happened as an aftermath of 2011 August stock price fall and accumulated antipathy towards economic inequality and corruption. Hong Kong protests took place as a response to Beijing’s control over candidates for Hong Kong’s chief executive. Occupy is a concluded movement while HK protests is an ongoing event. Thus I decide to use Occupy as the frame of reference to forecast moves in HK protests.
I decide to use a …show more content…

Cook and Erick R. W.Rice, “Handbook of Sociological Theory”). People trade social wellness, co-respond to incentives, and make rational decisions to each become better off. This theory also finds support in social capital theory, for a society accumulates social capital from individual interactions (making each other better off). Economic models can then be easily applied in this scenario to analyze the social wellness, or vice versa, social

More about Occupy Wall Street Essay

Open Document