The End of Occupy Wall Street?
The Occupy Wall Street movement has been a large protest movement across New York City as well as the rest of America, regularly drawing large numbers to the streets. The movement has drawn over $500,000 in donations, as well as received the support of labor unions and several elected officials. The protests, as the article says, have often disturbed nearby residents and been an annoyance to the police. On several instances, violence has even broken out. The looming question remains: “how to dispel the movement and how long will it take?”
The article notes that police have made several arrests and attempted to dispel groups of people, but it has not had much of an effect on the overall movement. In this situation, we could model the participants of the occupy wall street movement as a large network, with people as nodes and connections representing friendships or communication links between friends. This model is commonly used to investigate the spread of a movement, but we can also use this model to investigate the dispersion of a movement.
The important observation is that removing a few nodes from the movement likely will not destroy the movement, as the network is tightly connected. Most of the nodes will still have many neighbors attending the movement, bringing their willingness above their threshold and causing said nodes to attend as well.
As opposed to removing the “leader” nodes, adjusting the dynamics of the graph may be the best strategy to dispel the movement. The article interestingly mentions that a snowstorm caused significantly less turnout for events: the cold weather likely reduced the threshold for each node, resulting in a graph that reached an earlier chasm.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has been a challenge so far for the police and local residents, who have been trying to figure out how to dispel the movement. The answer may lie in network effects, such as lowering the thresholds of the nodes so the graph does not spread as quickly. Another method, though more extreme, that uses network effects would be to reduce communication between the nodes, such as suspending the internet or phone service. This would cause each node to have fewer neighbors, and reduce the number of connections that the Occupy Wall Street have to other nodes and thus reducing their influence. This would also cause an earlier “chasm” in the graph, and have a negative effect on the growth of the movement.