Reality show generation revolts against Facebook

News feed, not world issues, cause young people to speak out

Benjy Sarlin Guest Writer

Earlier this month, the ubiquitous social website Facebook.com instituted new sweeping changes. Chief among them was a “news feed” that bombarded users with daily updates on their friends, ranging from events as major as new relationships to those as mundane as writing “nice photo” as a comment.

A flurry of protest erupted immediately. Dozens of groups formed opposing the “stalker feed” that suddenly made their daily life so embarrassingly public. None of the information provided to the news feed was previously inaccessible to users, but the potential for awkward situations was immediately clear. Jealous lovers suddenly received news flashes of who the objects of their affection were befriending and whose walls they were gracing behind their backs. Friends could find out who was ditching them with a phony excuse to go the big party tonight.

And, most disturbingly, stalkers could know when people were in their room at their computer at any time since every single event is time stamped. All of this information could have been obtained by compulsively checking profiles and comparing them over time, but the streamlined format made this kind of obsession available to the masses. The fact that the Facebook team, themselves members, failed to recognize this beforehand was simply bizarre.

But more newsworthy than the change to Facebook has been the reaction to it. The largest anti-Facebook news feed group on, well, Facebook, accumulated 100,000 members overnight and had over 350,000 by the next evening. The response was especially impressive given the reputation our generation has acquired for exhibitionism.

We are, after all, the generation that bares tens of thousands of breasts for Girls Gone Wild (without even being paid, no less). We are the generation that finds nothing unusual about watching ultra-invasive reality shows - not featuring celebrities like Paris Hilton, Ashlee Simpson, and the ever-present Flava Flav - but ordinary people like ourselves engaged in everything from family disputes to plastic surgery makeovers. The generation that puts their lives for the world to see on millions of LiveJournals and MySpace pages. And yet we find that, despite what the media has told us about ourselves, in the end there are still shreds of privacy left that we cringe at the thought of losing.

At the same time, we are told we are the apathetic generation. The generation that fails to vote in presidential elections or read a newspaper. The generation with access to all the information and opportunity in the world, yet passionate about nothing. But we find that the right cause can invoke a swift and mighty response from our allegedly uninterested ranks.

It is heartening that, small and inconsequential as it may seem, there are still assaults on our dignity that we deem worthy of not only our disapproval, but immediate and overwhelming action. Facebook will almost certainly give in to the throngs of protests, especially if people begin quitting over its changes, as many have threatened to do; most likely this will have occurred by the time you read this article.

And yet I wonder: What if our generation saw fit to organize yet again in this manner, hundreds of thousands united literally overnight, against another assault on our dignity? What if several hundred thousand of us had written letters to our congressmen, say, about poverty or injustice or genocide, roused to action that day by some crime against human dignity itself?

The Facebook revolution of Sept. 5, 2006 teaches us that our generation has pride, motivation, and is willing to unite in ways previously unthinkable thanks to new technology. It's only a nice daydream, but I'd like to think we'll do it again some day, fighting for something more substantial than the right to hide our news feed.