Facebook and Student Organizing

Originally posted at Lose the Label and then Daily Kos.

Facebook is a mindbogglingly underused organizing tool for student activists. We’ve discussed this at Lose the Label before, here, here and here. But I wanted to make a post that more explicitly spells out how the tool has been used, how it can be used, and also speculates on why it hasn’t been used to its maximum potential.

First, I want to talk about why the potential has gone unrealized. [If you don’t care, skip to the part below the conspicuous line.]

So why haven’t we taken full advantage of Facebook’s potential? I see three main reasons.

The first one is simple: it’s not used because activists haven’t really taken the time to sit down and look at this as a serious tool. It’s seen as a place for procrastination, not productivity.

The second reason kind of accounts for the first: Facebook culture reflects college procrastination culture far more than it does activist culture. Most people join groups like they’d sign a petition, not like they’d join a club. People get annoyed when they get messages; they don’t want to be engaged. The way people do engage in groups is by making totally obnoxious posts in discussion forums and walls; you get whole threads with hundreds of people saying whether they’d “fuck the person above them” or stereotyping other people for shits and giggles, or stupid young white males going back and forth calling each other gay, etc. This reflects the general immaturity inherent in being young, but the effect is to make the groups feature tougher to use for activism because it flies in the face of [stupid] Facebook culture.

The third reason is unrelated to the first two, and affects totally different people: paranoia. Tinfoil hattish articles like this made many young liberals hesitant to embrace Facebook because they feared what it might turn into. But the irony is that in letting their fear of surveillance determine their decisions, this civil liberties minded group of activists robbed themselves of an extremely effective tool that could help us prevent the government (and the corporates, for that matter) from doing stuff like that in the first place.

How has it been used?

Status updates have found uses. Like after the VT shootings, the Hokies all updated their profiles to “I’m Okay”. Or, to go back to student elections, a bunch of my friends have updates like “Jill is {feeling good because she VOTED STUDENTS PARTY!!!}” Or during the regular election back in November ‘06, I changed mine to “Jake is {voting today}” or something like that.

Notes and posted links are used to gain exposure for news stories that matter to folks. YouTube videos of the student strike at UCSB on February 15th, for example. Or on Election Day… I posted a Note with my slate of endorsements for local/state races, and definitely got a few people to change their votes.

Most importantly, events have become a novice organizer’s best friend. Because of the Facebook “events” feature, anyone can now be an activist. It used to be (as late as 2 years ago) that to advertise an event you had to do all sorts of outreach, like fliering and messy stuff like that. Now, all you really need to do is create a good Facebook event, writing a good description and inviting a lot of people. So easy!

We’re all slowly figuring this out, and some people are now pushing the technology harder.

Crowning example: the VT vigil at UCSB.

The shootings happened in the morning. UCSB students immediately responded, organizing a candlelight vigil for that night. How so fast? They created a Facebook event and started inviting inviting inviting. They made about 10 admins, making it easier to invite even more people. Hundreds attended, and it made a story {with a picture} in the campus paper the day after.

In other words, Facebook allowed students to quickly improvise a successful event that received media attention.

This is the kind of shit that really gets an activist thinking, ya know?

Bluntly: social networking allows extremely fast, low-effort organizing. We’re all linked to each other via our webs of friends. News doesn’t depend on literal word of mouth anymore. Word of mouth can be typed now.

So, even as groups have so far proven to be a terrible waste of time, events have already sparked a small revolution in student activism.

Imagine if more groups started bucking the trend. What if they ceased to be petitions and started being treated like the serious organizing tools they could be?

It’d be 1968 all over again.

Some groups have already started. The two big Sudan groups are good examples, albeit soft and already outdated, as they [merely] gathered money and raised awareness. And the Campus Antiwar Network—-used to organize a conference call, and get antiwar activists talking, and REALLY inspiring each other. Lose the Label, we used it to organize this whole damn website, of course [no small feat, considering we did this from scratch and without a dime, ya know?], and the Black Armbands – May 1st group is a prime example of activism that is only happening because of social networking technology.

And the student election group I mentioned —- Rachel for Off-Campus Rep —- is also a boundary pusher because I received three messages from her in four days. She’s smart—-what the hell does she care if people quit the group? To her, its only purpose is as a GOTV mechanism; it becomes worthless the day after the election.

A temporary group, geared for a short-term purpose, action-oriented, discarded as soon as the group’s goal has been accomplished.

It’s the perfect example of how online organizing should be done and will be done as projects like Lose the Label take shape and push that way.

From a technology standpoint, we the activists are getting more creative, more assertive, more comfortable.

It’s like we’re injecting ourselves with civic engagement steroids.

I’m tellin’ ya: 1968.