In the last few days, footage has begun to roll out on our television screens from protests taking place on Wall Street.  The surprising thing was that the protest was on Day 10 when it started receiving mainstream media coverage.  So, what did it take for this protest to get coverage?  Oh, only innocent women getting pepper sprayed by NYPD officers for no reason, people being arrested for no reason, just sheer police brutality.  Only when violence erupted was when they would actually care.

Now, myself being apart of the online generation knew about this protest before it even started.  Informed by websites like Reddit and Twitter, day by day I would get updates straight from the protesters.  The biggest complaint was: why isn’t anyone covering this?

To be honest, most media knows that covering a simple protest like Occupy Wallstreet wouldn’t attract viewers, but once there seemed to be some sort of illegal act from a police force that is world renowned, not only that but from a officer of high ranks, they know they have a story.  Since the pepper spray story broke, the NYPD was not willing to name the officer responsible, that was until Anonymous stepped in.

Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna.  That is the name of the officer that pepper sprayed the innocent women.  Not only did they have his name but his badge number, his phone number, his street address, names of family members, and any current court cases involving him.  Anonymous has been known to do this whenever they feel that people should know who is responsible, in this case for the pepper spray incident.

His name is out and is being covered by every major media source but not only in the U.S. but also in the UK.  Just as I started this article, I finished reading an article about this written by a journalist over at the Guardian.

This protest would not have happened without tools like Facebook and Twitter.  Without websites like Reddit, we wouldn’t have a place where someone was posting daily about the events unfolding.  These resources directly aren’t the reason this protest could happen but resources like them are the reason.

Being able to upload a video straight to YouTube from your smart phone is key and without the videos we see today, we wouldn’t see the reasons to be outraged.

The Internet is what helped Egypt overthrow Mubarak, it let us see the atrocities happening in Iran and Libya, even today is helping us expose corruption within our own police force, the people in charge protecting us.  Protesting in the Internet age is  whole new game, where we fight our battles with a camera instead of a gun.