Facebook Feeding Frenzy: Resistance-through-Distance and Resistance-through-Persistence in the Societied Network

Abstract

This article presents a case study into the massive online demonstrations that occurred on Facebook (an online networking platform much like MySpace or Bebo) during Autumn/Winter of 2006 as a vibrant and contemporary example of resistance in action in the online domain. The demonstrations were carried out in response to the introduction of Facebook’s ‘News Feed’ and ‘Mini-Feed’ pages which greeted users upon signing in and presented a wealth of information about their friends and their online activities, seemingly without any form of privacy control. The pages even listed details of personal relationships and sexual orientations; both highly contentious issues. The response to this perceived intrusion on users’ privacy was staggering. Groups were set up overnight to pillory the Facebook News Feed, massive petitions that numbered hundreds of thousands were set up across international boundaries, online blogs and message boards became filled with incandescent comments.Eventually, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s founder and himself a former Harvard student) was forced to issue a public apology and then amend the News Feed to allow users the opportunity to edit their privacy settings. No longer would such information be so publicly accessible. No longer would privacy be taken so lightly. The student body used the very means by which they were being surveilled (that is, the cyber-synoptic infrastructure of the Facebook network) to organize an internationally resistant movement to support their right to privacy. This confrontation provides an engrossing example of the World Wide Web being used as a powerful tool to mobilize many bodies against a perceived force of oppression and subjugation. This was a clear demonstration that the politics of surveillance (Haggerty 2006) and the politics of the self matter greatly in present climes; where issues of privacy and the sanctity of the virtual realm are never far from the headlines. As such, it provides an excellent empirical backdrop to a conceptual analysis of resistance-through-distance and resistance-through-persistence (Collinson 1994) in the virtual realm.