For the first time in about forty years, college students are organizing. They have finally gotten off of the couch, out of the bars and away from their iPods long enough to realize that the world does not revolve around "Family Guy" and beer pong.
Well, technically they aren't doing it the same way. Instead of signs and buttons they have Macs and PCs. They've replaced the megaphones and loudspeakers with keyboards and improper grammar. Instead of secret meetings and rendezvous, they have created online protest groups so they can do something without actually having to do anything at all.
What is the severe injustice that has gotten these young people so passionate? What scourge to society has finally forced our apathetic generation into action?
It has nothing to do with war or campus policy. This menace, this terror, is none other than Facebook, the social networking site that allows college students to keep each other up-to-date on their lives.
The problem lies in the fact that students do not seem to like the changes made to the site. Before, if you wanted to find out about somebody (or stalk them), you had to actually go to their site and manually look through all the information. Now, anybody whom you have befriended in the network need not take the time to obsess about your life; they can just log in and Facebook does the stalking for them!
Students seem to have a problem with this because they believe their friends will use this information for deviant personal purposes. In order to believe this, though, you have to be one of two things. Either you have not reached the end of adolescence and retain an incredibly egocentric view of the world, or you are paranoid, which also means you are self-centered.
Let me clarify: If you thought "Hey, this new Facebook layout means that everybody is going to see and obsess about who I am dating," then you are probably in this category.
If you loved the new layout, however, you are probably like me. My first thought was, "Hey, now I can read about my incredibly self-centered friends without even trying."
Maybe this means that the egocentrics are right, but when Facebook makes it so fun and easy to see what your friends from middle school are doing, why not exploit that a little?
Before, Facebook was nothing more than an online profile. There were some pictures and interests, but all-in-all it was pretty boring. Now, Facebook is the supermarket tabloid of your network staring your friends. "John Q. is now interested in men and looking for whatever he can get!" "Jane Q. is now friends with that girl from your chemistry class that you can't stand!"
How in the world couldn't somebody love this?
I understand there are logical reasons behind everybody's argument. If you just broke up with your boyfriend, you probably do not want everybody to know. I am sure that the people of Facebook are aware of this issue, but the only way these people are going to pay attention is if membership goes down. That does not seem to be happening, especially since the hundreds of thousands of people that are opposing the site are actually utilizing the service to do it.
If we can't get passionate about something more important than social networking, at least let's do it right.
Christian Robinson is a junior telecommunications major and writes 'Overshare!' for the Daily News. Her views do not necessarily agree with those of the newspaper.
Write to Christian at cmrobinson@bsu.edu.
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