Urban Anthropology Blog

This past weekend I was driving through the Great Barrington in the Berkshires and came across this protest. The sight struck me for a few reasons. The Berkshires is a very rural part of the state. Great Barrington is a small town with a small main street and not much activity. In class we've been been heavily focusing on these protests in very urban areas; NYC, DC, SF, Boston, etc. It was a complete 180 when I saw it in such a small town. There were no news stations, no press, and little coverage. They wont make the nightly news or make it into any major newspapers. But theyre there, trying to voice their opinions to whoever might be driving through the small town. We sometimes forget that there are residents in these small, quiet, rural towns who arent in big cities who feel a need to protest. They are geographically more isolated than the locations we see in the media. It was quite a sight, and forced me to pull over and snap a few pictures. As I drove by back home, I honked a few times to show support, and I have to admit it was pretty cool when they all cheered at me. 

In all the coverage of modern youth movements and protest movements there is always a celebration of the power that new technology has for facilitating these movements. The ability of things like facebook and twitter are lauded for bringing together people from all over the world so that everyone can partake in these protests, even if it is just through internet solidarity. Group movements no longer depend so much on geographical location as on how often they can get themselves reblogged. However this article poses a new take on this technology: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27224/   It suggests that at the same time that protests like occupy wall street have been freed by the internet, so has what they are protesting against. Even if enough protesters are able to gather on wall street to actually disrupt the everyday routines of the traders it dosen't change the actually process of what wall street really does. The real business of wall street goes on remotely through the internet and cannot be stopped by picket lines. it is an interesting paradox that both the protesters and what they are protesting have become abstractions of their former concrete selves through the internet, making both of them more,far-reaching, powerful and harder to control.
- Hannah