Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Facebook as a vessel for political activism

I'm sure whoever invented Facebook didn't do it to share pictures and jokes with family and friends, or to keep in touch with your loved ones over long distances; no I'm sure its intended purpose was as a vessel for political activism, to spread the whimsical desires of the lunatic fringes by forcing regular people to click on the question "join this group?" If we estimated 10 million Canadians had Facebook accounts, then those 10 million people would not be very many degrees of separation away from each other.

I mean, how many "Degrees of Kevin Bacon" are we? It can't be a lot. With a group such as Apathetic Canadians Against Prorogation, you get your initial usual suspects who sniff it out right away, then the second wave of hits comes from party insiders who get the Tweet from Kady O'Malley; then after the dozens of CBC followers watch the infomercial and sign on, the only way it grows is by the kooks who already signed up sending a "please join this group" to everyone on their contact list. Again given the degrees of separation of Facebooking Canadians, it does not take long to spread this chain letter around the country.

My question is, how many people joined the group, and how many people were requested to join the group by someone they went to high school with and clicked on ignore? I am assuming that statistic is not as readily available as how many people clicked on join…

2 comments:

  1. I was invited by an individual I know here at the University of Alberta -- the President of the campus NDP.

    But I'm not opposed to the proroguation. And I'm pretty glad I didn't join the group. I mean this kind of thing is just embarrassing.

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  2. That facebook group has destroyed any credibility they ever had, with allowing it to denegrate to such a level.
    And how many clicked on please join this group, without any knowledge of what it was.

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