By Adam Asher
Back in the 1960s if young people were angry, they were not quiet about it. Students would pick up their signs, strum their guitars and start a protest. Today, they have traded in their guitars for a mouse, their songs for computers, and their protests for the Internet. In only a few short days, you can raise hundreds of dollars, spread awareness to thousands, or start a virtual riot and you only have eight letters to type: F-A-C-E-B-O-O-K.
“It’s a great way for people to feel like they’re helping out without actually going out of their way to do anything,” says Beth Mason, an eighteen-year-old industrial design major at Auburn University. Mason is currently raising money for Alzheimer’s via her facebook group, “for every 10 people I will donate $1 to the Alzheimer’s Association.”
“Things like that persuade others to jump on the bandwagon,” she said.
Facebook has been around for years, but its powers of expansion seem to grow every day. Recently facebook groups expanded so they were no longer specific by school, opening people’s eyes to the many opinions, inside jokes, and nonsensical ramblings of students throughout the country who choose to express themselves through facebook.
It didn’t take long for Brody Ruckus to get over 400,000 people show their support for his group. There are enough students on facebook to achieve his goal; all he had to do was find a cause people could rally behind. His cause was a threesome.
Unfortunately, the members of his group were not members for very long. The mass numbers of facebook users who were excited enough about Brody’s threesome to double click their mouse in support of him were just as quickly kicked out of the group when facebook removed his account.
As it turns out, Brody Ruckus was not going to have a threesome; he was not even a real person. Brody Ruckus was no more than a marketing ploy by Ruckus music, a free downloading service for college students.
While Brody Ruckus no longer exists on facebook, his group did prove one very important thing. Facebook has an uncanny ability to unite college students over a common interest. After the death of the Ruckus group, facebook users took a hint and began to come together for more charitable purposes.
Beth is one of many facebook users who have taken Ruckus Music’s idea and turned it into a humanitarian crusade. She has over 500 members in her group and claims that many people have taken an interest and given donations directly to her, or asked where else they can send them. There are more and more groups popping up every day promising to donate money to a certain cause.
The humanitarian crisis in Darfur is one of the most popular reasons to start a facebook group. The group “for every 1,000 people that join this group, I will donate $1 to Darfur” has over 460,000 members. There are also groups for raising awareness as well as groups full of people who pledge to donate money to the cause.
But as with any trend there has to be a backlash.
“I was inspired by the very large Darfur group,” said Jon Lynn, a law student at the University of Minnesota. “Specifically, I wanted to make a group that more or less poked fun at a couple problems I had with the Darfur group”
Lynn is the creator of one of many parody groups. “For every 100,000 people in this group, I will donate $1 to the human fund,” according to Lynn, raises no money and advertises a fictional group taken from the hit television show “Seinfeld.”
The human fund group takes a subtle approach to the art of parody facebook groups, targeting a certain audience that understands the reference. Others are a bit more blunt with their parodies.
Groups that claim if enough people join the creator will kick himself in the crotch a number of times or shave his head are a common sight in one’s facebook profile. One group has a picture of Paris Hilton representing it and claims “if 1,000 people join this group, I will re-lose my faith in humanity.”
Its creator, Allison Reddy, a senior at Wellesley College, claims the group is just a joke to make fun of other groups, but it makes a pretty clear statement about a generation that is too lazy to get out of their computer chairs, yet likes to appear to be helping.
There are no laws that bind creators of facebook groups to their pledges, but Lynn thinks there is certainly the potential for something good in facebook’s modern-day approach to politics.
“To what extent people will use facebook to get involved in certain political issues I think remains to be seen, but if there is any kind of interest, facebook has a great potential to involve people in the political process,” he says.
Whether facebook is the next big political propaganda machine remains yet to be seen. But one thing is for sure, a total stranger’s adventurous sex life is a cause over 400,000 college students think is worth joining a group for.
