Liking this on Facebook won’t change the world
I woke up this morning, and my roommate’s Facebook status was:
“Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in TARP money, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes? Yeah, me neither.”
I quickly copied it and made it my status as well.
Two minutes later, Student Association President-elect, Morgan Nelson, made it her status. Hey, we’ve got a student government official involved! I feel accomplished. So accomplished I’m going to take a nap. Okay, not really.
But, now what? Well probably nothing.
No offense to Nelson or my roommate, but even if two million people make that their status, and we all have a good laugh, cry, and zOMG about it, nothing will change. Our federal government will still be a shameless corporatocracy run by cronies and lackeys and shills. Birther consipracy theorists—and Donald Trump—will still say that President Barack Obama isn’t a legal U.S. citizen. And the Cubs still won’t win the World Series.
Why do we allow so many conversations to begin and end on Facebook and never go anywhere else?
I attended a media conference in Hastings this weekend. The keynote speaker the first night told the audience that “our generation” is bad at communicating face-to-face and thus everything is text messages and Facebook statuses. He then went on to give a detailed explanation of how he and some cohorts exploited the malleable nature of online content to make lots of money for BMW and themselves.
The gist of the scheme was that they created a huge farce, made YouTube videos of it, engaged the interests, hopes, and desires of hundreds of thousands of viewers, and then pulled the rug out from under them. The video so many people watched and became engaged in was in fact a hoax to advertise the new BMW 7-series.
Even though the videos were admittedly false, BMW still received 2,500 pre-orders for the new car. So a falsehood on the Internet affected the real world.
This is the same model that activist statements like this morning’s Facebook status update need to follow. Stir up the passionate dissenters on the Web, but move that conversation into real world action.
That keynote speaker may be right about our youthful propensity to communicate via text and Facebook, but we cannot allow ourselves to think that virtual communication is the same as real-world action. Advertising can’t be the only medium where the crossover into legitimate action occurs.
So, let’s not stop having those Facebook conversations. If you agree with that status about the backwardness of our money-hungry society, post it as your status. But don’t let the conversation end there.
Write to your senators, join an activism group, volunteer at a soup kitchen, or get involved with the student government here at CSC.