APATHETIC. Uninterested. Lazy. As members of the “Me Generation,” we’ve heard these terms used to describe us before. We have tended to combat these notions in the form of electronic protests, railing against our critics in e-mails, posting angry entries on blogs, creating Facebook groups in hopes of garnering over one million members to collectively affirm that we do, in fact, have the ability to care about and fight for a worthy cause. Members of our generation are constantly criticized for lacking the political and moral gumption to get up out of our desk chairs and take to the streets in the name of [insert cause here].
Recent events have given our critics no reason to believe otherwise.
The uproar caused by the alterations Facebook made to its terms of service earlier in February, namely its assertion that it had a license to use its members’ content in any way and at any time it wanted to, set off another wave of internet activism. Facebook users were pissed, and they knew exactly how to show it: by creating Facebook groups to voice their opposition to the policy.
In an immediate sense, the protest worked. Facebook quickly revoked its terms and opened up the process of creating the new terms of use to all of its members. According to the Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro, more than 30,000 of the site’s users contributed suggestions in the first twelve hours. This “collective editing,” writes Pegoraro, has the potential to influence the way numerous companies go about serving their clients and making their policies both understandable and accessible.
Yet examined from another angle, this supposed achievement on the part of the Facebook-using masses just serves as another example of the laziness of a generation of people who think they can turn to a computer screen to change the world.
For starters, how hard was it for an angry college student to create a new event on Facebook titled, say, “I Hate Facebook Terms of Use,” and invite all of his or her friends? And how hard was it to receive the electronic invitation to said group and click the “Join” button?
Moreover, the uproar caused by a change in Facebook’s terms of use was blown entirely out of proportion. Sure, it’s scary to think that a company is figuratively walking around somewhere ready to brandish damning pictures of us or publish the comments we wrote to another friend. But using Facebook is a completely voluntary decision, as is posting pictures from your Spring Break in Cancun or you best friend’s twenty-first birthday party. The user determines the content placed on Facebook in the first place.
Jacquielynn Floyd from the Dallas Morning News put it this way: “Face this: You are your own front line of defense in maintaining your privacy. This extends to vetting personal information on the Internet. In the same way, it means exercising discretion over allowing people to take hilarious party pictures of you that might wind up being published as the Bong Hit Heard ‘Round the World.”
This is not to say that allowing consumers a significant amount of input in the creation of a company’s policies is not a good idea; it is. What is disheartening is the incredible amount of energy and effort people put into the Facebook campaign compared to the amount of effort that could have been devoted to much more worthy causes. Forms of activism like door-to-door campaigning, demonstrations, even petition signing and writing letters to the editors of newspapers have been trumped by point-and-click politics, a lazy way of being opinionated without having to try too hard.
There are over 80,000 members of the “Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” group that was created in response to the uproar over the site’s terms. It’s too easy to join a Facebook group organized for the sole purpose of protecting one’s own rights and to call it a movement. It is much more difficult to organize in large numbers to combat serious problems like poverty, homelessness, racism, or discrimination.
Facebook has made it too easy for this generation to feel like they can make a difference. No, scratch that. It has made it too easy for this generation to feel like they have made a difference. Winning the supposed war against Facebook’s legalistic faux pas is not akin to making a difference in society. Assembling together and showing Facebook the strength of your virtual numbers may scare the company’s owners into revising a policy that was never that uproarious in the first place, but the same tactics will not suffice when it comes to working towards true progress in areas that actually do warrant our attention.
It is time to take a step back from the computer screen and stop using our keyboards to feel like revolutionaries. Those scanning their screens at Facebook may have heard us this time, but I doubt that there are many others listening.
Amelia Meyer’s column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at a.meyer@cavalierdaily.com.
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