Wednesday, October 5, 2011

"Why I am dropping out of school"

A letter to the editor of the University of Cincinnati student newspaper, newsrecord.org

My name is Coulter Loeb, and I am a social-media manager for Cincinnati’s “Occupy Wall Street” solidarity group. As a political movement we are only three weeks old, and our objectives are not yet as clearly defined as most of us would like them to be. All we know is that we are fed up with the way our government has treated us. And so today I would like to tell you why I’m dropping out of school.

I’ve trained here at UC as a member of the 4th Estate, as a photojournalist, since 2006. As I watched our financial collapse through the lenses of both traditional and social news, I began to question what the difference is between a journalist and a citizen. I found that having grown up along side the Internet I was entirely incapable of distinguishing one from the other. To define the differences between the two I had to take a step back from what it means to live in a digital nation.

Using the language of cybernetic theory, the 4th Estate is the feedback mechanism of a functioning democracy. It would be impossible for citizens to make informed decisions in the voting booth without journalists constantly producing information about how the world is changing around us.

The 4th Estate controls our democracy’s means of information production. Through the past century these means have centralized into major newspapers and broadcast networks. If you as a citizen wanted your voice to be heard by the rest of the nation, you had to go through the editors of the 4th estate.

This is what the Internet is changing. In the era of Facebook and Wikipedia, the social media are evolving EVERYTHING. It is a matter of fact, not theory, that every single laptop on this campus has near equal opportunity for its signals to be heard across the nation, and that every signal’s message is equally as insignificant when compared to the roar of the digital crowd. We are all becoming members of America’s 4th Estate.

We have the technology to peacefully organize that digital roar into a cybernetic forum where the short-term interactions of individual feedback determine what issues are most relevant to the our nation in the long-term. We have the technology to force the separation of business and state to the forefront of the upcoming presidential elections.

A hundred citizens met last Saturday at Sawyer Point to plant the seeds of our movement, and our online assembly is growing constantly. The change I can make to this nation beginning this weekend is greater than any change a piece of paper, a diploma, will provide to me in a year. I don’t care if you are a democrat or a republican - if you are fed up with the way things are in the country then join our cybernetic assembly. March on the city with us this Saturday. Show your elected officials what it is YOU want. We are the 99%, and with the presidential debates already taking place, this is the season for our social revolution.

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