Response 3

Response 3: People's Movements, People's Press


In People's Movements, People's Press, Bob Ostertag does a very concise job of incorporating historical value and context in chronological order of social movements and how technology acted as a catalyst for these movements to occur. As he mentioned, many historians had consistently argued that the birth of a social movement was parallel to the birth of a journal or publication. I thought his choice of social movement division was an interesting one - he specifically chose abolitionists and suffragists to group together, then the gay and lesbian movements, then the antiwar underground GI movement, and then environmentalism.
I think this was intentional because of the close involvement each of these had with each other, and also, a previous movement's impact on society as a leeway for the following one to occur. For instance, abolitionism paved the way for the women's movement, and Ostertag described how the development of the printing press allowed for publications by sympathizing women, who started by being involved in abolitionism, and then reflected on their own situation. Before blacks won their freedom, a seemingly impossible feat, women were simultaneously jumping on the "hey, we want freedom too" bandwagon, and used their journalism skills to the best of their abilities, but were overshadowed by the prevalence of abolitionist publications. With this movement in particular, I noticed how he integrated important facts and research that he had compiled into the telling of the history, so the book seemed like a historical story.
My favorite aspect of the book was Ostertag explaining what basically could be described as the semiotics of journalism. In the section devoted to the women's movement, he writes about how the lack of tools (tools being words such as feminist, misogynist, gay, or queer) within the certain technology, (this technology being journalism, the printing press, and the English language) impedes upon communication of an idea. It's not just that it is unclear and therefore confusing. It is that one literally does not have the terminology to print in papers, which means there is no way to convey an idea, which means the idea cannot exist. This ties in directly with Tilly's discussion about the term "social movement" and how it came to be coined, and also how it wasn't considered to be in existence before the word was invented. This is not to say that uprisings didn't exist before the term "social movement" was used, or that female activists or thinkers did not exist before "feminism" was used. It's that the group, without having a name or word to be associated by, cannot be considered because it cannot be explained to the opposition.