Exercise Your Right To Vote

I think we talked about this a few weeks ago. Facebook, in response to the discontent of it's members, revamped it's governance documents based on all sorts of user feedback. They are now offering members a chance to vote on the new documents. This is participatory Internet at it's finest. Do your digital civic duty and vote on Facebook's proposed governance documents. You must vote no later than midnight tonight.

This week's social media thoughts

This week there were no fewer than 4 great articles in Sunday's NY Times about social media, (styles section: celebrity Twitter ecosystem) and three others I'm attaching below. One of the comments that came out of the facebook article was about a teacher who wanted to friend his whole class to talk about rehearsals from a dance where parents thought it was 'creepy.' In Tuesday's online session we might envision another way he could have pulled off the same thing electronically without invading their facebook lives using another of the tools we've been using.

Also, in the same Facebook article, regarding facebook's connectivity, Mr. Zuckerberg recalls the story of Claus Drachmann, a schoolteacher in northern Denmark who became a Facebook friend of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Denmark’s prime minister. The teacher invited his Prime Minister to speak to his class of special-needs children; and the prime minister did just that.

Do stories like this illustrate facebook’s power to cut through arbitrary social barriers or are they just good fodder for publicity ? Zuckerberg says “This represents a generational shift in technology,” and adds, “To me, what is interesting was that it was possible for a regular person to reach the prime minister and that that interaction happened.” Do you agree that this is more than a random exception or does this medium really allow for the public to get closer than ever to representation?

For other articles about participatory media this week in Sunday's NY Times you might want to check out 3 articles: the Wikipedia story from the Week in Review section, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/weekinreview/29cohen.html

the one about the fact that widespread anger and collective passivity exist side by side: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/opinion/29venkatesh.html

and and the article on Facebook's growing personality... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/technology/internet/29face.html