Cappuccino is back in business with my sincere apologies for the long hiatus. As you can see, I’ve been busy posting elsewhere in cyberland, and sometimes even tabbed browser windows aren’t enough to help me keep track of multiple online personae. One day, according to Aili McConnon at BusinessWeek, my online lives will link into one another and I can manage them all at once. That day could not come soon enough.
That said, other parts of Web 2.0 progress have moved so fast while this blog’s been off duty that I hardly know where to begin. Perhaps with a news update:
- Oxford University took a real killing in the press for using Facebook to go after student parties. I took a dig at them myself in BusinessWeek.
- Facebook has been hauled in for a potential killing in court. Some other Harvard alums say Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea from a network they were thinking of launching. The case looks pretty shoddy, but that’s mostly because there aren’t very strict copywright laws for this web stuff anyway.
- The U.S. Republican Presidential candidates took some dips in the polls because they’ve said they don’t want to do a debate on YouTube! like the Democrats did earlier this summer. Apparently being web savvy and appealing to young voters can actually move the needle in politics today.
- The piece de resistence: one of the candidates, Rudy Giuliani, faced the heavy embarrassment of having the world discover that his own daughter actually backs a candidate from the other party. How did word get out? Some fellow student saw it on her Facebook page and leaked it to the press.
Together, all this seems to suggest that these websites are getting to be more “established” and more concerned with rules, an idea we’ve discussed here before.
On the other hand, the politicians and authority figures have to participate and have to worry about what’s on Facebook, or it might cost them votes or just make an arse of them. Which confirms my longstanding suspicion that the mainstream and the exceptional are less distinct categories today.
But more importantly, it suggests to me that our whole generation is pretty engaged with the wheels of society—we’re driving the politicians to take up our formats, they’re coming to our online playgrounds to deal with us and the rules and structures that govern culture (the law, for example) are having to figure out how to accommodate those playgrounds into their reasoning.
So how come everyone keeps saying we’re so apathetic? This week, the New York Times collected essays for a contest they are running for college students in the U.S. They had people write a response to this article by Rick Perlstein about how disconnected and disengaged young people are from the big ideas of society and politics. It’s all about America, but the article describes a bunch of students in ways that any young person anywhere in the world can react to. Read the piece here, and then please tell me what you think. Does this sound like the students you know? Are we this materialistic and politically useless?
Or does all the legal and political rumbling around Facebook and YouTube! suggest we’re driving change in ways Rick Perlstein is missing?
Cherwell24 is not responsible for the content of external links.
