In an age of questionable civil liberties and privacy, our generation has remained silent to the backdoor dealings in Washington. But Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, seems to have hit a sore spot for millions of students nationwide.
At the root of this Internet flare-up is Facebook's new "news feed" feature it unveiled on September 5. Every Facebook action of every Facebook friend is now displayed on your homepage so you can keep tabs on what photos they've uploaded, significant others they've dumped, and groups they've joined. You can strike any action you've performed from the news feed with a click or two on your "mini-feed," which perhaps more disturbingly displays all of your actions on your profile page. But you aren't able to completely rescind your participation in the feature; you have to negate every action individually.
Granted, the new layout of Facebook is terrifyingly thorough. Information - or, as Facebook would like to call it, "news" - about your friends jumps off every page. Your home page is bombarded with the happenings and actions of every single person in your (digital) social realm. Immediately, reasonable worries and claims of making it easier to stalk individuals surfaced. Opponents want more than just a way to disable the process, they don't want such a comprehensive record of such digital social minutiae displayed anywhere on the site.
Most interesting, though, is that Facebook users are voicing their disapproval the only way they know how: through Facebook. Facebook groups have sprouted up all over the networking site to try and put a halt to what they consider an invasion of privacy. Hundreds of groups calling for the old Facebook style to be reinstated have attracted hundreds of thousands of supporters. As a result, there's an effort afoot within the anti-news feed community to centralize the support and get everyone under one group with a unified direction and cause. The "counter-feed" movement's growing pains are vaguely reminiscent of "real world" lobbying on issues like anti-war demonstrations, the pro-immigrant movement, and gay-rights advocacy.
And in a twist of irony Alanis Morissette would be proud of, the counter-feed groups are gaining notoriety through the very thing they're protesting. Every time one of your friends joins a group calling for return of the old Facebook, it shows up on your news feed. Essentially, the news feed is fueling the very civic process and democratic debate that is conspiring to kill it. Because of this publicity, the biggest counter-feed group has more than 290,000 people (as of press time) who joined up in "support" of the counter-feed movement.
Here, supporting a group is an easy process built into the Facebook interface, one that has lent considerable power and momentum to the counter-feed movement. Without such an easy way to support the cause, would there be such rage coming from the users? Moreover, because the dissatisfaction is so easy to express - through one click of the mouse - can it be called rage? Or is it more like meek disapproval?
In response to all the hooplah, Zuckerberg penned a piece for the official Facebook blog. In his response to the anti-news feed contingent, he wrote, "We agree, stalking isn't cool; but being able to know what's going on in your friends' lives is. This is information people used to dig for on a daily basis, nicely reorganized and summarized so people can learn about the people they care about."
Facebook seems to have crossed the line that separates a provider of information from the apparent synthesizer of that material. The site has enlarged every action performed in a social network from the micro to the macro. All of the items the news feed broadcasts across your entire social network were already public and could easily be found with a bit of Internet digging. The citizens of the Facebook society seem to be irked by the prospect that that information is being handed over on a silver platter, without any work required. Somehow, privacy feels breached if there's no sleuthing involved. Slashdot, a technology news website quoted one user as saying, "Stalking is supposed to be hard."
Zuckerberg's blog entry hints that he believes in the news feed innovation and is going to stand behind his agenda. But with enough civic unrest, with enough dissent from Facebook users - Zuckerberg's constituents - will Zuckerberg back down from his aggressive initiative of centralizing and communicating the news of a social world? The best test of this new rumbling from an otherwise lethargic generation will be if Zuckerberg holds strong. If he continues to support what many consider an invasion of privacy, will the protest follow the path of the general public's reaction to the arguable threat on civil liberties? Are we a generation who believes that the news feed was an inevitable step in our new, information-rich digital societies; or will we unify under a common cause and pressure the chiefs of our digital states? The answer may determine our generation's definition of the classical, modern, and digital American citizen.
Chadwick is a senior majoring in Anthropology and minoring in Communication and Media
Studies.
