So, this whole Occupy Wall Street thing has been going on for a month now. What started as an act of civil inconvenience in New York City spread throughout the nation and then the world, creating pockets of justified but nonetheless aimless protest in multiple time zones. The speedy pervasiveness of the movement is thanks to the Internet's use as the primary tool of communication between demonstrators. As I'm often wont to point out, the Internet is more of a mirror than a window. It often doesn't show us anything beyond ourselves, only an intense reflection of what we already are. The Internet presence of the Occupy movement is no exception. Consider the website OccupyUpdate.org. While there's really no "official" voice of the movement, OU.org has a good handle on authority because it's little more than a series of Livestream links to cams placed at many of the protests around the world. Some are better organized than others.

The central Manhattan stream, for instance, is set up as an open mic booth where demonstrators take turns making statements. Considering how courteous the Wall Street protesters have been (they even cleaned up the private park they're occupying to avoid a confrontation with the police), it's all too fitting that their Update stream is a comment queue.

That's not to say there isn't plenty of classic New York attitude coming through the stream as well. All of the streams show us what we already know about the regions where they take place. It's not quite stark enough to count as stereotypical, but it's damn close. The New York stream is a mix of angry and educated, a crowded procession of people who are informed in a very bookish sort of way and rather loud about it.

The stream from Seattle, which records just a few blocks from my own apartment, is a different creature altogether. That's because Seattle is markedly different from New York City, both in tone and in politics. The Seattle demonstration is considerably smaller than the mothership protest and it's less like an angry explosion of political action and more like a laid-back street fair. I've visited the demonstration grounds multiple times to confirm that the Livestream is accurate. Both on video and in person, Occupy Seattle mostly consists of amiable people agreeing about how liberal they are, with occasional moments of inflammation on the weekends and only a nominal police presence.

One of my favorite streams is the Occupy Minnesota page. During off periods the stream is basically a camera trained on a small handful of people lounging in a public square and at bigger times it plays out like a town meeting. As I write this, one of the organizers is attempting to sort out tomorrow's activities from a pool of suggestions mumbled by some folks sitting in the grass at the demonstration site. It's not exciting but it's so damn real. It makes me wonder how much of any great protest from history consisted of people sitting cross-legged, raising their hands to make bad suggestions about what the hell to do next.

There are, of course, the international streams as well. Occupy Amsterdam has its camera trained on the tent city that has sprung up at the site, but mostly just captures people milling around and Occupy Hamburg seems to be plagued with technical difficulties. It's hard to catch a good cross-section of streams as many of them go offline during late night hours.

Ultimately, I wonder whether the Internet and other media coverage of the Occupy movement helps or hinders the cause. After all, the idea of thousands of people gathering in simultaneous demonstrations all over the world is a lot more stunning than the reality of what those demonstrations entail. As in most things, long protests mostly consist of waiting around and people being people. It's not stirring but for a few, explosive moments and it's not even threatening. Transparency in direct action politics may have made the protests more accessible and pervasive, but it also took away the core of the story and poetry that make them inspiring.