Rene Alvarez | College students should find a real cause - not Facebook

Never let it be said that the college-aged population is apathetic or self-absorbed.

Indeed, when college students see injustice somewhere in the world, they respond with overwhelming and decisive action and take deliberate measures to effect needed change.

In fact, students' willingness to confront wrongdoing at great risk challenges any image of a disinterested, self-centered, frivolous college-student population. No other recent event demonstrates this more than the dramatic challenge students successfully mounted against the apparent evil of Facebook.com.

According to its Web site, "Facebook consists of . groups of people who can see each other's profile. Facebook has networks for colleges, high schools, workplaces and geographic regions."

The site's greatest popularity seems to be among the college-aged populations. A variety of these networks exists. You've probably heard of Friendster.com. A friend of mine showed me her pet's profile on Dogster.com. And Meet-Up played a big role in the early successes of Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign. Personally, I prefer to meet people the old-fashioned way: through friends or in person, in real-life social settings.

Facebook recently introduced new features for members. Two of these features, a "News Feed" and a "Mini-Feed," alerted users to changes in the profiles of other members in the same circle of friends. These automatic alerts included information such as users changing their relationship status and adding new friends.

But as civic-minded as they are, Facebook members would not let this aggression stand for long. They took action, voicing their displeasures in blogs and online petitions, enlisting up to 730,000 protesters on one site alone. (To give some perspective: there are about 24,000 students at Penn. So this on-line petition had the Penn student population about 31 times over) And under unrelenting protests and threats of an "A day without Facebook" boycott, the company relented.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, admitted his company "messed up," and Facebook changed the available options to allow users to disable the Mini-Feed.

Apathetic? Self-absored? Frivolous? No, siree.

And it comes as no big surprise, either. Today's college students are continuing that long-standing tradition of protests of baby-boomers during the 1960s that they've heard so much about. Forget that most of the organizers and protesters who marched on college campuses against the Vietnam war were white middle-class kids who got riled up only after the draft started affecting them and those close to them. What counts is the over-romanticized interpretation of college students speaking against injustice.

Penn students have a fine tradition of their own of standing against injustice. In the spring of 1999, Penn officials temporarily banned alcohol from registered on-campus events in response to a number of alcohol-related incidents that rankled administrators.

Not to be oppressed, student leadership organized a protest. Many students voiced their displeasure at a rally on College Green; the DP reported in March of 1999 that up to 1,000 students attended. Many carried signs with slogans like "Take away my alcohol, I'll take away my tuition," and speakers led the crowd in chants like "What do we want? Beer! When do we want it? Now!" Then-UA Chairman Bill Conway declared the rally was "to defend our rights as students."

It was during that same spring, by the way, that the United States was preparing to lead NATO military forces into the former Yugoslavia Republic - the U.S. was responding to the Slobodan Milosevic's genocide against Albanian Serbs. No protests against genocide made headlines in the DP, however.

This past Sunday, protests and rallies were held around the world to bring attention to the humanitarian crisis and genocide in Darfur, Sudan. The New York City police department reported a turnout of about 20,000. But remember, up to 730,000 found the time to "protest" against Facebook.

With their pick of any number of injustices at home and abroad to choose from - from Iraq to Afghanistan to Sudan - students have drawn a line in the sand of how much injustice in the world is too much.

And that line is? Facebook.

And so, thanks to student protests, the world is a better, safer, more humane place for all of us. But for how long?

Rene Alvarez is a sixth-year History Ph.D. candidate from Chicago, Ill. His e-mail address is alvarez@dailypennsylvanian.com. Rico Suave appears on Tuesdays.

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