Facebook provides youth a powerful voice

Since Facebook, the online social network, was founded by Mark Zuckerberg five years ago, its power and reach have grown extensively - 150 million active users, each with an average of 120 friends, collectively uploading 850 million pictures a month.

It's become a part of every youngster's lexicon: to 'facebook' someone. At its most basic, your Facebook page consists of your name and picture, educational and professional affiliations, contact information, and a messaging interface. The grand objective is to digitise a major source of our information: our social networks.

Think about that. Today, we gather information from our social networks largely through face-to-face interaction.

At a friend's dinner party, you may learn about someone's great holiday, their views on the elections, and news on who's seeing who. So you digest that information, and form opinions or make decisions. But with Facebook, you can access all that information at whim, from the comfort of your home.

Savvy youngsters 'facebook' their friends across the world, and even potential partners - finding out what they look like, what they do, who they know. And if this has irreparably digitised human relationships, then no one seems to be lamenting the casualty of old-fashioned talking.

But perhaps most importantly, it has transcended the scope of a regular social networking site. What Facebook may be on the verge of delivering us, is a grand youth revolution through this medium. Already, politicians and publicists are jumping over each other to set up an observatory in this vibrant youth commune.

President Obama's campaign wooed the "online youth" aggressively, and benefited greatly from their support - his politician page on the website gathered over 1 million supporters in 2008.

On the campaign trail, he attended a youth rally that started out as a Facebook group. Such are its magical powers - strategy dictates that political action and support among the youth is today best mobilised online. But if today's youngsters now have a powerful platform for political action, they also have one for protest.

When the Israeli assault on Gaza was raging, an application that updated your Facebook status with the Gaza death toll became de rigueur among angry users. Everyday, millions logged onto Facebook as usual and went through their friends' status. Only now they were regularly reminded of the furies being unleashed in the Middle East and the tragic human cost.

Similarly in the aftermath of the Mumbai carnage, the internet was where youngsters expressed their condolences, their solidarity with Mumbai's citizens and also their fury with New Delhi's politicians.

Action groups were formed and the youth mobilised each other on Facebook to organise a candlelit vigil at the Gateway of India, which later turned into a peaceful march.

Even the Sri Ram Sena, responsible for attacking pub-going women in Mangalore, bore the brunt of Facebook-generated contempt. Thousands joined a Facebook group called the "Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women".

Today's youth are combating major political and social issues between each other, in real time, like never before. And slowly, online networking websites are becoming one of the most powerful political platforms for the youth demographic.

An entire generation of politically apathetic youngsters is being turned into an activist legion, thanks to the 'online option' they have been provided by websites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter (which gained considerable popularity in the aftermath of the Mumbai carnage)

Perhaps unwittingly, these websites have spawned a brand new political constituency - noisy, restless and agitative - that today's political parties do not want to offend or ignore. It is difficult to deny that the younger generation has found a powerful collective voice.

But critics continue to argue that these websites are just a forum for young people to pictorially advertise their fashionable, popular lifestyles. Indeed, there is a touch of showmanship to it all.

Today's youngsters often pose thoughtlessly for the camera, becoming manipulators of their outsides. They take photographs incessantly, committing every event dinners, parties, concerts to film, and putting them up for public display.

As a result, they also often end up trapped in those pictures as quotations of themselves. Crimes have been solved and arrests made thanks to evidence from pictures on Facebook. Employers have even rejected potential candidates because of objectionable content on their profiles.

But ultimately the potential of social networking rests on the shoulders of the youth. They can choose to use this to become responsible young adults: protesting injustice, and rallying their peers towards just causes. Or instead, they can squander their generation's networking boon by indulging in frivolous online pastimes.

In just five years, websites like Face-book have revolutionised the social and political contributions of the youth, and provided them with a powerful choice. The next five years perhaps will tell us what they chose.

Rakesh Mani is a New York-based writer.