Activism and the New Facebook

As I’m sure many of your friends’ angry statuses indicated on your new facebook homepage, facebook gave itself a makeover… again. Quite a few of my friends reacted to this by saying that the new facebook is too much like twitter, and more concretely that it sucks.

Recently, many of my facebook friends have been adding an application that allows them to voice their opinions on the new facebook. This application was not made by facebook, and it serves as an intersting example of a phenomenon I see: for all the hype about how much facebook has the potential to enable activism, facebook has been concretely successful almost exclusively in promoting activism against itself–think back to the introduction of the news feed or applications.

As I see it, joining groups and causes on facebook for things such as “Save Darfur” or even for Barack Obama don’t actually have much of an impact on anything.  When you listen to the mainstream media talk about facebook, this is often what you hear about.  We’re the generation that joins facebook groups and does our activism online.

I think facebook has an impact on our society and possibly even on our political culture in a different way.  Very simply, facebook increases people’s social capital.  By connecting you to friends, and particularly friends that you are geographically separated from, facebook increases users’ webs of contacts. The Harvard political scientist, Robert Putnam, argues that what makes for successful civil society is a connected society–a society with lots of “social capital.”

So my opinion is that facebook improves our society but not in the way many people would have you believe.

The potential is there for this direct activism through groups and what not–the ironic example of backlash against facebook on facebook proves it.  If there was only something that would resonate with users as much a new crappy layout with cheesy rounded thumbnails…