Facebook Uproar

People often don't know what kind of power they have until they exercise it. In fact, one could say that exercising power is in fact the creation of power. I think this has proven especially true in the recent uproar over the facebook feeds.

For those of you who might not know, the feed allowed information which was previously available but only if you knew where to look - which friends were now dating, which parties were being thrown without you, which people had added photos or updated their profile, etc - much easier by compiling it in a list on the login page. The privacy level was technically the same as before, but at the same time facebook.com became more public.

Initially I thought the changes were fun and interesting, but then again I am a very public person. The large majority of facebook users seem to have made a very big deal of this. One group currently has over 700,000 members in the course of 3 days. That means 10% of facebook users are members, and if all similar groups were included that number would be much higher.

In a reply by Mark Zuckerberg to the facebook.com community, he apologized and insisted positive changes would be made. Perhaps most surprising to me, and the reason for this post, are the reactions to this letter. People seem to be genuinely surprised and happy that Mark is responsive to their concerns, and empowered by their success (despite and because of acting as only one person in a huge majority) in effecting change. In a time when what it means to be a citizen, an activist and a consumer of information is changing rapidly, events like these serve to unite and set precedents for the future of this generations web presense.

In many ways this is similar to the massive and frequent online manhunts which have become a hot topic on the Chinese mainland. Eastsouthwestnorth does an amazing job of chronicalling these events. Clearly the parallels between large numbers of people acting in unison and feeling empowered are large. But it also points out that, like the facebook feed, these issues are outside the daily political and social life. Chinese protests of this nature have shyed away from criticizing any central authority, and many other protest groups of government policy on facebook.com fail to garner near this much interest. We are becoming empowered to act in a world different from the one in which we live.