I've been doing a lot of thinking, talking with a lot of fellow students, and doing a lot of reading for one of my political science classes, and a few things have become clear to me. Politics just doesn't seem very important, while things like Facebook's new features are cause for massive protest! It seems that it all comes down to this: politics is like a foreign world, while Facebook is such an important part of students' lives. For those of you who are unfamiliar with them, Facebook's new features allowed people to more efficiently follow who you became friends with, when pictures of you were made public, and what your changing interests were. People went nuts!
On the other hand, a majority of students and young people, readers of this site not included, are not very politically engaged or interested. Sure, all know who the President is, and who their governor is, and right now a lot are angry about the state of the nation, but outside of that, they aren't well informed on the nuances of major issues like the economy, free/fair trade, health care and, of course, the War in Iraq. Most have no idea who the candidates running in their districts are, let alone candidates making noise in other regions of the US. So, few take part in the process. However, when something like Facebook's new wire feeds come to their attention, they'll spring up protests and letters and angry words at the drop of a hat.
I think it's time we start to examine what politics and government mean to us as a generation. How about college education costs? Pell Grants have been cut drastically under this administration, so it's much harder for families to pay for the best education possible. So many people have parents who lost jobs that were sent overseas, another major hardship. And how about the war? People our age are over there dying in what seems like a more and more hopeless cause! What if that was your brother or sister?
The fact of the matter is that these things affect us more than we think. I'll be back in a bit to discuss how we can start raising attention to that, and how we can reprioritize our lives.
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You make a valid point. I had actually never thought of Facebook in that way before, but really all it comes down to is laziness. I think that young people of our generation aren't informed because they choose not to be informed. The resources are out there, it's just that some people are too lazy to use them.
you make a good point but facebook is scary. stalking is not a cool thing and its something that needs to adressed on facebook because a lot of people don't like how others can see what they have changed. one thing that i do like about facebook is the whole you have to aprove of whos your friends in order for them to see the stalking information that they started doing. as i said in the front of my ravying you make a good point and it should be adressed...
That is true. And I agree that it's all just laziness that keeps our facebook generation from becoming interested in anything other than what our friends have been up to lately. We just need someone, something to motivate us into been interested in politics and to motivate us to change the things that we don't like about how our nation is run.