Fascinating data analysis of the 'We are the 99 percent' Tumbler

[pegkerr]

Rortybomb has done some number crunching of the data presented on the We are the 99% Tumblr, and the analysis is definitely worth reading:

DATA

The site features pictures of individuals holding their signs, and occasionally the tumblr reproduces the text of the signs themselves underneath the image as html text. Sometimes the text under the image is blank, sometimes it is a different message, but often it is the sign itself.

In order to get a slightly better empirical handle on this important tumblr, I created a script designed to read all of the pages and parse out the html text on the site. It doesn’t read the images (can anyone in the audience automate calls to an OCR?), just the html text. After collecting all the text on all the pages, the code then goes through it to try to find interesting points.

It’s a fun exercise, pointing out things I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. .... Going through the ~1,000 entries in the tumblr, here is the distribution of ages that I was able to generate:





Given that we assume tumblr and webcams are technologies of the young, the age distribution has a higher tail end than I had expected. There were two major clusters – people around 20 and people around 27, each with their own major concerns.

What were the most frequent words? We ate up all the words across all text and came up with the following list:





“Of Interest” is my call–I removed all the pronouns and other words that occur frequently but didn’t get at the chief concerns of the 99%. The major words are jobs and debt, as a quick glance of the site would show. The ability to make it month to month shows up here more than on the glance, with “pay”, “afford”, “rent”, “food” and “bills” right underneath the big items.

Student debt is a meta-concern, but what are the others? Scanning, I totaled four major categories. Here is the number of individual entry texts that flagged each, and the search terms to grab them:





“Children” has a few false positives in it (“It used to be my dream to help disabled children…”), but only a few. Student loans are an overwhelming presence, but it often has the same terms repeated and giant dollar figures next to them so it sticks with you. For all the people indentured with student loans there are almost as many worried about how they are going to take care of their kids.

Scanning the entire text, what is equally interesting is what is missing. There’s no signs of a luxury fever or cascading consumption heading downhill. These aren’t the signs of people envious of their peers going off to the high-end financial sector and then getting bailed out. The only time luxuries are mentioned are in a mode of denial (“We do not own HD TVs, expensive automobiles, use cable TV, or indulge in other..”). The only time unions are mentioned are in retreat and defeat (“No union”, “threatend [sic] by funding cuts and union busting”). So how to theorize this?

[read the analysis at the link, which leads to this summing up:]

The people in the tumblr aren’t demanding to bring democracy into the workplace via large-scale unionization, much less shorter work days and more pay. They aren’t talking the language of mid-twentieth century liberalism, where everyone puts on blindfolds and cuts slices of pie to share. The 99% looks too beaten down to demand anything as grand as “fairness” in their distribution of the economy. There’s no calls for some sort of post-industrial personal fulfillment in their labor – very few even invoke the idea that a job should “mean something.” It’s straight out of antiquity – free us from the bondage of our debts and give us a basic ability to survive.....Upon reflection, it is very obvious where the problems are. There’s no universal health care to handle the randomness of poor health. There’s no free higher education to allow people to develop their skills outside the logic and relations of indentured servitude. Our bankruptcy code has been rewritten by the top 1% when instead, it needs to be a defense against their need to shove inequality-driven debt at populations. And finally, there’s no basic income guaranteed to each citizen to keep poverty and poor circumstances at bay.

Take a look at the whole entry to read the analysis. Very well done and illuminating.

Comments

[elements]

Thank you for sharing this.