Question: What were the initial reactions regarding protests (organization/groups) and what were “facts” about the shooting that have since changed?
Analysis of Word Cloud:
For my analysis I wanted to take a look at what the initial reactions were, more specifically how they got together and organized. After digging deeper into the Pulsar platform, I narrowed my search to only August 7th through August 11, (Thursday thru Monday), in order to only see initial reactions. At this time Darren Wilson’s name had not been released yet, and Michael Brown was still the most talked about person in the United States. Some of the common themes from the first few days of protesting include, dialog between police and protestors, key players in the Twitter world, and the photo that is also attached, which is a flyer that was handed out to spread the word and message out during protests. The collection of ‘crunched’ Tweets in my search were 238 total. With a narrow search it allowed me to see the raw data before media and popular belief took over. From my initial reactions of the events that happened that day to looking towards this data, my views completely changed. In 2014, I viewed the initial protests as chaos and unorganized, but now knowing that the media misconstrued a fair amount of the events, I wanted to take a look at what actually happened. I was surprised to see, so fast, how many groups and committees gathered support in mass numbers. Most importantly, the hand out (seen in the photo) shows how organized the protesters actually were in attempting to get their voice heard.
Conclusions drawn from further investigation:
My research shed light on the actual accounts of the protests, some of which were coming straight from street level. But, it also seems like this shooting was not the sole reason behind the protests. It seems like the straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of frustration levels from protesters and unrest from both sides. It was really interesting to see the dialog between protesters and police. For example: “@Nettaaaaaaaa: The tanks are saying over the intercom "RETURN TO YOUR HOME", the crowd yells back "THIS IS OUR HOME" #Ferguson #STL #MikeBrown.” This interaction just speaks to the bitter unrest that it seems like this community was under. The motive that drove the protest was the shooting of Michael Brown, but the civil unrest was truly the gut reaction from the protesters. It seemed like a “not again” ideology, and voicing their concerns in protest from provided an outlet for social media and media alike to take the accounts and amplify it to the public. My research provided me with a background of the accounts of those first few days of protesting and I believe sets up a solid topic of discussion for this course.
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