In his Times column this morn­ing, David Carr won­ders about the future of the Occupy Wall Street move­ment and, spe­cific­ally, its fate as an ongo­ing topic of mass-​media con­ver­sa­tion. “Occupy Wall Street left many all revved up with no place to go,” he writes. Which is a prob­lem, traditional-​press-​coverage wise, because: “In addi­tion to the 5 W’s — who, what, when, where and why — the media are obsessed with a sixth: what’s next? Occupy Wall Street, for all its appeal as a story, is very hard to roll for­ward.” That could be true (though “very hard,” of course, is quite dif­fer­ent from “impossible”). And it could also be true that the fea­tures that may give Occupy, poten­tially, endur­ing power as a move­ment — its mal­le­ab­il­ity, its per­missive­ness, its abil­ity to act as an inter­face as well as an event — might also be the forces that, day to day, chal­lenge its abil­ity to con­vene atten­tion. Par­tic­u­larly at the level of the mass culture.

It’s worth return­ing, for a moment, to the idea of trend­ing top­ics algorithms, which reward dis­crete events over ongo­ing move­ments, favor­ing spikes over stead­i­ness, effect­ively pun­ish­ing trends that build, gradu­ally, over time. (Which is to say: effect­ively pun­ish­ing the notion of a “move­ment” itself.) This bias toward the spiky over the sticky is a defin­ing fea­ture, as well, of the daily work­ings of the tra­di­tional media (and of their great organ­iz­a­tional mech­an­ism, the Epi­phanator): Occupy’s much-​discussed lack of a sin­gu­lar iden­tity has been not only kind of the whole point, but also, to some extent, the res­ult of the way the move­ment has been medi­ated by a press that tends to reward new­ness over endur­ance. Occupy’s story — like all stor­ies of ongo­ing polit­ical move­ments that are told by tra­di­tional pro­du­cers of daily journ­al­ism — has been told epis­od­ic­ally, in stac­cato rhythms that emphas­ize explos­ive rup­tures in expect­a­tion. (“Expect­a­tion,” of course, being defined by the Epi­phanator itself.) Occupy is, like so many other move­ments, sub­ject to “the tyranny of recency.”

But that may well have just changed. This week­end, a series of pho­to­graphs — images of a riot-​gear-​wearing cop shoot­ing a group of stu­dents in the face with pep­per spray — made their trans­ition from journ­al­istic doc­u­ments to sources of out­rage to, soon enough, Offi­cial Inter­net Meme. Per­haps the most iconic image (taken by UC Davis stu­dent Brian Nguyen, and shown above) isn’t expli­citly polit­ical; instead, it cap­tures a moment of viol­ence and res­ist­ance in almost alleg­oric dimen­sions: the solid­ar­ity of the stu­dents versus the sin­gu­lar­ity of the cop in ques­tion, Lt. Pike; their steely resolve versus his saun­ter­ing non­chal­ance; the panic of the observ­ers, gathered chorus-​like and open-​mouthed at the edges of the frame. The human fig­ures here are layered, clas­si­fied, dis­tant from each other: cops, protest­ors, observ­ers, each occupy­ing dis­tinct spaces — phys­ical, psych­ical, moral — within the image’s landscape.

As James Fal­lows put it, “You don’t have to ideal­ize everything about them or the Occupy move­ment to recog­nize this as a moral drama that the protest­ors clearly won.”

Exactly. The image — and its sub­sequent meme-​ification — marked the moment when the Occupy move­ment expan­ded its pur­view: It moved bey­ond its con­cern with eco­nomic justice to espouse, simply, justice. It became as much about inequal­ity as a kind of Pla­tonic con­cern as it is about income inequal­ity as a prac­tical one. It became, in other words, some­thing more than a polit­ical movement.

The image itself, I think — as a sin­gu­lar arti­fact that took dif­fer­ent shapes — con­trib­uted to that trans­ition, in large part because the photo’s nar­rat­ive is built into its imagery. It depicts not just a scene, but a story. It requires of view­ers very little back­ground know­ledge; even more sig­ni­fic­antly, it requires of them very few polit­ical con­vic­tions, save for the blanket assump­tion that justice, some­how, means fair­ness. The human drama the photo lays bare — the power­less being exploited by the power­ful — has a uni­ver­sal­ity that makes its par­tic­u­lar­it­ies (geo­graph­ical loc­a­tion, polit­ical con­text) all but irrel­ev­ant. There’s video of the scene, too, and it is hor­rific in its own way — but it’s the still image, so eas­ily read­able, so eas­ily Pho­toshop­pable, that’s become the overnight icon. It’s the image that offers, in trend­ing topic terms, a spike — a rup­ture, an irreg­u­lar­ity, a breach of nor­malcy. It’s the image that demands, in trend­ing topic terms, attention.

And it also demands par­ti­cip­a­tion. A key fea­ture of the Epi­phanator, the mech­an­ism of press-​mediated storytelling that defined our sense of the world for so long, is its impulse to organ­ize time itself into dis­crete arti­facts. Journ­al­ists tend to be obsessed with begin­nings and, even more import­antly, end­ings. This is how we make sense of things. What’s not­able about the Lt. Pike image, though, is how dynamic its path has been — this des­pite the defin­ing still­ness of still pho­to­graphy — by way of the com­ple­ment­ary fil­ters of social media and human creativity.

The image of Pike (nom de meme: the Pep­per Spray Cop) isn’t the first to reach a kind of iconic status when it comes to Occupy Wall Street. (It’s not even the first to involve pep­per spray. See, for example, the hor­rific image of 84-​year-​old Dorli Rainey, her face drip­ping with burn-​assuaging milk after being sprayed in Seattle.) But it is the first whose impli­cit nar­rat­ive — one of struggle, one of out­rage — offers view­ers a kind of eth­ical, and tacitly emo­tional, par­ti­cip­a­tion in Occupy Wall Street. A moral drama that the protest­ors clearly won. Images, Susan Sontagargued, are “invitations” — “to deduc­tion, spec­u­la­tion, fantasy.” They invite empathy, and, with it, investment.

It remains to be seen whether Pep­per Spray Cop, as a sin­gu­lar image and a col­lec­tion of deriv­at­ives, will prove endur­ing in the way that pre­vi­ous iconic pho­tos — Phan Thi Kim Phúc, Tank Man — have done. But Pep­per Spray Cop, and his ad hoc icon­o­graphy, is a telling case study for observing what hap­pens when polit­ical images become, in the social set­ting of non-​traditional media, de– and then re-​politicized. And it will be inter­est­ing to see whether the image’s viral life will affect David Carr’s ques­tion of “what’s next” for Occupy Wall Street in the world of tra­di­tional media. “Just a week ago,” NPR noted this morn­ing, “it was start­ing to seem like the Occupy move­ment might be run­ning short of fuel.” But “now that move­ment seems to have fresh energy after a week of police crack­downs across the country.”

Nie­man Journ­al­ism Lab