The Origin of this Group

So where did this group come from???

The Short Version:

Facebook.

The Long Version:

Around September 4th, Facebook changed its format to include a controversial information-sharing feature called “Newsfeed” that disturbed hundreds of thousands of users. A group called “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)” emerged and gained roughly 500,000 members in a matter of hours. Wall posts were moving at extremely high speed, reaching rates of 100 posts per minute.

It was a riot.

I was watching this unfold and I thought two things. First, ‘holy crap, this is hilarious, it’s a damn riot.’ Second, ‘what if we could channel some of this energy into something more productive?’

So I decided to experiment.

I created a group called “Students for Changing the Post-Minifeed World.” The purpose was just to steal some of the energy from the “Students against Facebook News Feed” group and turn it into action on social justice issues. The first step was just to assemble all the people who were watching the Riot and wishing we could do something more.

So me and a few UCSB activist buddies started spamming the wall of the “Students against Facebook News Feed” group with the following scripts:

Hi, sorry to interrupt the minifeed hatefest, but we created a group yesterday for people who care about things other than minifeed. Please join it … if you care about things other than minifeed. We’re just trying to channel this energy into something productive.

Link: http://ucsb.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2207879909

Thanks for reading.

and this one:

Spamming for social justice!

http://ucsb.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2207879909

Bump!

We worked in teams. One or two people would post our spam message over and over again on the wall, and one or two other people would defend them when trolls started calling them fags and whatnot. That way, we could post the message and explain it and recruit members at the same time.

In other words... we were winging it.

But about 300 people joined the group on that first night.

It continued growing for a few days through invites and further raids on the “Students against Facebook News Feed” group. We reached 700 before we leveled out.

So we had spontaneously gathered 700 students from all across the country who wanted to fight apathy.

Not bad!

So now that we had the people, we had to figure out what to do. I posted a discussion thread asking what cause(s) we should get behind, but we weren’t able to agree on anything and it was getting divisive and contentious. Understandable, considering that we’d come together in such a spontaneous way… how can that many people agree that any one cause is more important than another???

No worries.

So instead of committing to one issue, we came up with a way to take up every issue.

A website.

A Facebook for student activists. A place where well-meaning people from all over the country could come together and meet and organize national networks around the issues they care about. An action center. A forum. A think tank. Good people. Good ideas. Good results. Communication facilitating action.

Social networking for social justice.

We also set a ‘meeting’ for the following Sunday night, to be held in an AIM chatroom. The agenda consisted of drafting a mission statement and developing a course of action.

Roughly 20 students participated in the meeting. We came up with a name—Lose the Label—and the mission statement on the group front page right now. We also developed the website idea.

The site ran into problems initially (site hosting issues), but as of writing, they’re making good progress. It’ll be weeks before it’s up, but when it is, we’ll have an incredibly powerful activism tool. We just have to be patient. If you can help, please contact Jake Duhigg at jduhig@siu.edu.

In the meantime, we’re going to start using the Facebook group itself to facilitate activism. The discussion threads have a lot of untapped potential, hopefully we can use those. Next week should be very interesting.

So that's where the group came from. (And a hint at where we're going.)

Stay in touch and please come back to this blog for updates on what we're up to.