The Human Amplifier

In New York City earlier this week, I witnessed the beginnings of the "Occupy Wall Street" action of anti-plutocracy protest that began as a call by Adbusters magazine. On Saturday, 17 September, activists started sleeping in the small, privately-owned Zucotti Park, just around the corner from Ground Zero. In between meetings with lawyers, publishers, and colleagues that brought me to Lower Manhattan, I would stop by to talk with the participants, whose numbers grew each day.

The several hundred people gathered there had already shown themselves to be savvy and resilient. But most striking for me was that the center of activity in the plaza was not a love-in or jamboree but an open and seemingly endless conversation, the General Assembly, an egalitarian, participatory forum by which the leaderless group is attempting to determine its aims and tactics.

To avoid running afoul of a ban on the use of amplifiers in the noisy urban space, the group has employed an ingeniously simple technique of chanting in unison the words of the speaker just after they are uttered. Often, people just taking the floor to speak over what some have referred to as the "people's microphone" begin with "Mic check" to get the crowd's response, "MIC CHECK."

Here's an example of the human bullhorn in action.



I can readily imagine how, in addition to serving as a public address system, this rhythmic chanting generates the kind of communal feeling that anthropologists and ethnomusicologists the world over have noted. At the same time, without the prompting of a moderator, the immediate feedback of the crowd constrains speakers to make their contributions deliberate and succinct.

Here's a good video piece by Nathan Schneider exploring the General Assembly practice and connecting it with a similar practice by the Spanish May 15th demonstrators.