occupy the news: a movement and its portrayal

To say that the Occupy movement is polarizing would be a massive understatement.

Ask people on the street about it and you’ll get plenty of extreme opinions. Some will champion it as a movement on par with the civil rights activity of the 60s. Others will lambast it as dissent of the lazy and uninformed.

The latter belief is particularly noteworthy today. In general, broad social movements tend to get the sympathy of the American public. But the Boston Globe published a poll recently that shows that only 29 percent of Americans support the Occupy movement.

Why? The biggest issue seems to be whether or not people can relate. Agreeing that the nation’s economy and government are broken is one thing; buying into the unspecific, angry, often hippie-esque spirit of Occupy is another thing altogether.

Part of this, of course, has to do with how the movement has been portrayed. Mainstream media outlets have ostensibly (hopefully?) tried their best to portray the movement in an objective light. The problem? It’s just too easy to fail at this goal.

It’s easy for disdainful anchors to make slights about the movement. It’s easy to explain the movement in an unflattering light. And, of course, there is the issue of soundbites (i.e. on-air interviews).

How does one, as a reporter, discern between people who will give clear, informed answers and those who have no idea what the hell’s going on? Answer: you can’t. And so we end up with what I’ve dubbed the ineloquent-but-mad Occupy protester: that person who, when they’re asked why they are protesting, answers with bullshit about the rich and the heroism of the underdog.

Ineloquent-but-mad Occupy protesters are part of the reality that is the Occupy movement, sure. But local news outlets, pressured by the stresses of live broadcasts, don’t have a vetting process when it comes to talking to strangers. This brings to light a couple of quibbles: does the inability to find legitimate, diverse beliefs misrepresent the movement to an impressionable American public? And why not look to true leaders - like noted professor and activist Cornel West, who was present at Occupy Wall Street - to properly contextualize what’s going on?

Conservatives frequently complain that mainstream news has a hard, liberal slant. While this can be debated all night (and day) long, one thing that everyone can probably agree on is that the news is undoubtedly very prone to inadvertent bias. News outlets have failed to show all angles of the Occupy movement, and for that, the movement - and the public - has been slighted.

gotye and cold nights: the intersection of music, emotion and learning

I remember speeding through a hazy, wet October night on my burnt-orange P.O.S. bike, listening to Australian indie gem Gotye belt his laments.

“But you didn’t have to cut me off,” he sang. “Now you’re just somebody that I used to know.”

And amid the fog and the sting of the wind and the uncomfortably numbing night chill and the lonesome fluorescent-orange glow of the street lamps, I felt a little, well, sad.

Why? Probably because the lyrics struck a strange chord with regards to a romance from way back when, and made me think about a time in which being sad was kind of a regular thing.

Music’s effect on the human mind is a fascinating thing indeed. I remember listening to music - all sorts, all genres - from a very young age, and always wondered whether or not a lifetime of music consumption ever did anything to me. I figure it has to - these songs hold messages, and emotions, and repeated exposure to these messages and emotions must do something. Right?

In American psychologist Howard Cutler’s book The Art of Happiness, the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso points out that our notions of love and romance are highly subjective, largely dependent on environment and culture.

“Don’t you ever get lonely, without someone to yourself?” Cutler asks in one lazy afternoon meeting over tea.

“Why? I have everyone I meet, and everyone who is a friend,” answers the Dalai Lama with a laugh.

So maybe we get our obsession with soulmates from culture. Music is a cultural product, and one that works in a cyclical fashion: artists express certain ideas, these ideas are propagated into society through song, which then inspires other artists. It makes sense that we’re learning to live to a literal soundtrack of messages.

“Somebody That I Used to Know” makes me reflect on my life, whether I like it or not. It encourages a sustained belief in the sadness of distance. Even the melody - something that conveys and inspires emotion through just musical form - inspires sadness through its minor tonality, playing as background music to all those thoughts running through my head.

I finally got home on my creaking bike, the last few bars of the song wrapping up the trip. It was three minutes of random daydreaming, maybe some life analysis thrown in for good measure. And though it was just another small musical moment, I couldn’t help but think that it was changing me for good.