Occupy Wall Street: Rhetorical Analysis

An unemployed millennial joins his fellow comrades, creating an army whose mission is to march to Wall Street, the pit of corporate greed. The army is equipped with picket fences and posters, and is ready to fight in order to seize what is rightfully theirs. They fight, and as the war they wage is continuing strong, those on the sidelines observe that the eternal struggle, the one marked with social media activism that has created an entire movement to Occupy Wall Street has changed absolutely nothing. Occupy Wall Street was an example of social media activism that demonstrates social media alone cannot change challenging problems, and confirms Malcolm Gladwell’s argument about the ineffectiveness of social media activism in affecting legitimate

Occupy Wall Street has prided itself as being a leaderless movement, one initiated and led by the masses. This rhetoric sounds poetic and ideal, but no social organization or movement can succeed without a structural hierarchy. Occupy Wall Street’s own website states that “Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement”, and when a movement “[doesn’t] have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals.” That rings true with Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street has not had caused any systemic, meaningful change, due to its lack of structure. Different groups and people can claim they align with Occupy Wall Street, but since they do not have a leader, no individual can gain the ethos necessary to claim to speak for the entire group, or keep the movement focused on a concise and practical message. The fact that Occupy Wall Street is leaderless also delegitimizes Occupy Wall Street. If a member of Occupy Wall Street spoke about something that was clearly erroneous, and said something like all cops should be shot, then Occupy Wall Street cannot actually distance itself away from those erroneous comments of one individual, for they lack a leader or structural hierarchy to clearly define goals or to adequately condemn certain individuals in their movement who speak erroneously, and Occupy Wall Street prides itself on being all-inclusive. With effective social movements, like the AA civil right movement, leader were able to distance themselves and their organizations