Facebook politics taste too del.icio.us
From Berkman fellow Gene Koo...
Networking is the lifeblood of all politics. So why are the Obama and other political applications for Facebook so terribly disappointing? At best, they function like bumper stickers for profile pages, and while my neighborhood’s lawn signs fill me with civic pride, I also know that sporting “I like Ike” buttons is a feeble way to participate in politics. Effective political engagement encompasses much more than the mere act of voting or supporting a candidate; it includes writing to officials, participating in hearings, and most of all, joining civic associations.
Given the critical role that associations play in our politics, why isn’t Facebook, the social networking tool par excellence, leading the way to Politics 2.0? For starters, the default profile field “political views” allows only 8 choices along the overbroad conservative/liberal spectrum, with “libertarian” and “apathetic” thrown in to mix it up a bit. By contrast, the “religious views” allows both selection from a picklist as well as custom text. (Personally, I would identity my politics as “contrarian”). Click on your choice and you’ll find “over 500 people” with the same label as well as options to narrow down by gender and relationship status. Clearly, this field was created to facilitate romantic rather than political get-togethers.
Tocqueville would suggest that Facebook groups hold a lot more promise for civic engagement than the “political views” label, but many of them turn out to be little more than vanity labels as well. The group Writing Papers Single Spaced First Makes My Double Spaced Result Climactic, which currently boasts 107,378 members, illustrates the fact that many Facebook groups’ reproductive strategy is to sport a colorful, ironic, evocative, or silly name that looks cool on your profile page. Thus, Facebook’s groups operate sort of like a self-directed del.icio.us — tags as temporary tattoos.
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Networking is the lifeblood of all politics. So why are the Obama and other political applications for Facebook so terribly disappointing? At best, they function like bumper stickers for profile pages, and while my neighborhood’s lawn signs fill me with civic pride, I also know that sporting “I like Ike” buttons is a feeble way to participate in politics. Effective political engagement encompasses much more than the mere act of voting or supporting a candidate; it includes writing to officials, participating in hearings, and most of all, joining civic associations.
Given the critical role that associations play in our politics, why isn’t Facebook, the social networking tool par excellence, leading the way to Politics 2.0? For starters, the default profile field “political views” allows only 8 choices along the overbroad conservative/liberal spectrum, with “libertarian” and “apathetic” thrown in to mix it up a bit. By contrast, the “religious views” allows both selection from a picklist as well as custom text. (Personally, I would identity my politics as “contrarian”). Click on your choice and you’ll find “over 500 people” with the same label as well as options to narrow down by gender and relationship status. Clearly, this field was created to facilitate romantic rather than political get-togethers.
Tocqueville would suggest that Facebook groups hold a lot more promise for civic engagement than the “political views” label, but many of them turn out to be little more than vanity labels as well. The group Writing Papers Single Spaced First Makes My Double Spaced Result Climactic, which currently boasts 107,378 members, illustrates the fact that many Facebook groups’ reproductive strategy is to sport a colorful, ironic, evocative, or silly name that looks cool on your profile page. Thus, Facebook’s groups operate sort of like a self-directed del.icio.us — tags as temporary tattoos.
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