“The People’s Microphone” was used during union protests in Wisconsin.
Visible throughout the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests, is a technique dubbed as “The People’s Microphone”. It has been deployed nationwide, and is becoming the dominant vehicle for group interaction and communication. So what is it?
“New York City requires a permit to use “amplified sound.” Since Occupy Wall Street does not have a permit, police have interpreted that to mean even the use of an electric bullhorn. As a response to such limitations, a phenomenon known as the “People’s Microphone” has evolved, where a person making a speech pauses while the nearby members of the audience repeats the previous phrase (somewhat) in unison.” The entry adds, “The (People’s Microphone) effect has been called “comic or exhilarating – often all at once.” Some feel this provided a further unifying effect for the crowd.”
Advocates of this new method claim that it is a work-around to restrictive city ordinances, and serves as a ‘progressive communication’ tool which allows groups to speak and achieve “community consensus”, and that the audience is asked to listen in a whole new way and to actually help transmit the message to others. They will tell you that accuracy and transparency are the crucial elements to the People’s Microphone.
NLP device: ‘call-and-return’
OWS’s new People’s Microphone is quite simply a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) application or technique. Its consensus arrival method, also known as “call-and-return”, has now become the audio device of choice- spreading across the country as quickly as the protests themselves.
Crowd participants slowly repeat each phrase the leading speaker is saying to them, with a series of hand signs used to provide the speaker and the group with feedback.
To the casual observer, this new system of communication may appear as compelling, as it is metaphoric. It might also remind you of the infamous ‘pass the conch’ scene from the Nobel Prize-winning novel by William Golding, Lord of the Flies.
It is a very slow and tedious process, often resulting in very few actual issues being fleshed out. In most cases, it takes triple the amount of time to convey the same amount of information that a normal speaker would accomplish by talking directly to the audience. But this can only be done when the group is forced to repeat the words of the speaker, so the speaker is forced to talk slowly, using fewer words at once. In this way, it is also a mesmerizing and extremely hypnotic group communication tool.
In this way, such NLP methods can also be used to promote ‘group-think’ and could be described as collectivist mind control education at its very finest.
Successful NLP systems like this are commonly used by sales people in business, as well as in advertising and of course politics, working in restricted bloc of words, and often with restricted vocabularies.
Group moderators insist that this is done so that ‘everybody is safe’, and that the group is ‘doing things properly’. Any interaction with a speaker can only be done by employing a series of parochial child-like hand-signs, normally reserved for children attending school in K-8 grades.
There is certain appeal to ‘being part of the community’, where group leaders will ask the crowd for a ‘temperature check’ in order to determine “how ‘the bloc’ feels about what someone has said”, and if what someone is in consensus with “the bloc”. The audience will offer up a hand signal of waiving both hands to show their approval.
Once a consensus is identified, it’s typical that members of “the bloc” will feel that they are part of the collective, and thus, “part of the change”.
Unfortunately, in this type of system most of the group have little idea of what they are actually repeating, or who and what they are supporting with their hand signals, waving their hands, or making a triangle sign to communicate.
Watch as the speaker in the following video explains to his ‘bloc’ the collective will be banning any applause, because the clapping of hands might drown out someone within the collective who is trying to be heard. See this unfold in the bizarre Occupy Atlanta video below:
The Conch Shell
Ralph and Piggy discover the conch shell on the beach at the start of the novel and use it to summon the boys together after the crash separates them. Used in this capacity, the conch shell becomes a powerful symbol of civilization and order in the novel. The shell effectively governs the boys’ meetings, for the boy who holds the shell holds the right to speak. In this regard, the shell is more than a symbol—it is an actual vessel of political legitimacy and democratic power. As the island civilization erodes and the boys descend into savagery, the conch shell loses its power and influence among them. Ralph clutches the shell desperately when he talks about his role in murdering Simon. Later, the other boys ignore Ralph and throw stones at him when he attempts to blow the conch in Jack’s camp. The boulder that Roger rolls onto Piggy also crushes the conch shell, signifying the demise of the civilized instinct among almost all the boys on the island.http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/flies/themes.html
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