About a week ago, I received a Facebook event invite for the
March 1st National Day of Action. The description stated “We refuse to pay for
the crisis created by the 1%...this is a call to work together, but it is up to
each school and organization to determine what local and regional actions.” I
found out that they were going to be in Berkeley and I decided to check it out.
On March 1st, 2012, UC Berkeley students and
supporters attended the Day of Action for Public Education. Approximately 150
attended at Sproul Plaza in Berkeley, California for a noontime rally to “protest
state cutbacks to education” say the UC Berkeley News Center. Briefly passing
by and checking it out, I noticed that there weren’t as many supporters as the
Occupy Cal movement demonstrations. After looking at a few articles, one even
named “Slow, soggy start for Day of Action”, I was curious as to why the protest
seemed so small this time around.
Upon further inspection, I realized that the university
website articles and other traditional media articles seemed very objective and
boring, simply stating the movement’s objectives, but didn’t include any juicy gossip.
However, the protests twitter (Occupy Education) told a different story. Every
tweet was positive and uplifting, exemplifying the protesters accomplishments
and actions. They tweeted all aspects of the protest from many different schools,
a livestream containing actions such as Humboldt’s samba circle and fire show
and occupying a theater. YouTube was
also very subjective as they made short videos on the march to Sacramento while
interviewing many of the leaders of the movement who showed strong support for rebelling
against public education cutbacks.
While all of the sources had different views on the day of
action, it brought up the bigger issue: Which sources are we supposed to look
into? How often are people misguided by different social media outlets? Was the
movement actually successful? (I can’t tell because all my sources are telling
me something different.)
