Digital Dissenter

The Causes application on Facebook knows that it’s my birthday tomorrow. And for the last few weeks it hasn’t stopped asking me to use my birthday to "change the world”.

The application has been contacting me via Facebook and over email in an attempt to remind me that on my birthday my Facebook profile page will be getting a lot me attention than usual – that is of course assuming that all of my “friends” decide to write on my wall or send me a virtual gift.

Is the Causes application now offering me a metaphorical birthday-cake cutting opportunity whereby I can make my birthday wish? Isn’t the point of birthday wishes that they stay a secret because if you tell anyone what it is it won’t come true? Well I hope the same is not true of virtual birthday wishes because this year (thanks to the subtle suggestion of Causes) I’m considering getting my friends to support the “Stop Animal Cruelty” cause, and I could use the application as a way of giving my friends a triple-whammy of guilt packed with the facts that:

1) It’s my birthday and 

2) The only thing on my wish list is a click away and 

3) Even if they don’t click on it they’ll still see the link to the cause on my profile accompanied by a gruesome image of an injured dog, and they will be so much better and so much more aware because of the experience. Will it work? I doubt it. Here’s why:

When applications first started cropping up on Facebook, everyone went wild. For every profile page you clicked on you would have to wade through at least five or fifty applications ranging from “Vampire Quest!” to “Fluff Friends” and “What Disney character are YOU?!?” just to find your friend’s wall. With all the rubbish applications that were essentially spam dressed up as some quick entertainment, it was quite refreshing when one came across a ‘legitimate’ application – one such application was Causes.

The application essentially provided a great way to group and categorise one’s more benevolent interests and (probably more importantly) a way to show the world (well, your Facebook friends) that you care about the starving children in Africa, the dolphins, women’s rights and installing a “dislike” button on Facebook. Basically, Causes added an air of social awareness and morality to one’s otherwise shallow profile that was filled with “Fluff Friends” and “Quizzes about ME!”

Now I’m definitely not someone you would call an armchair or desktop activist. I’m probably more active for the causes (real causes, not the application) I believe in than 90% of my friends on Facebook. But according to Causes, I fail as an activist because of the 15 causes that I am a member of, 0 are classified as ‘active’. 

Seeing this on my profile severely offended the activist in me. And to add insult to injury, along the right hand column of the page Causes showed me my rankings among my friends. I was being outranked by people who had just one action! Am I slipping into slacktivism or just slack?

Before I had even thought about it I quickly followed the instructions to make myself ‘active’ in at least one cause again. But now in terms of making myself ‘active’ I was given three options: give someone ‘props’ for reading something on some page, read something myself or invite some of my friends to join as a way of channelling my own guilt.

How disappointing.

I despair at the use of causes to simply build up a particular identity on a social media platform. And yet here I was on the verge of an identity crisis because a Facebook application deemed my activism unworthy of ‘props’. There is certainly something to be said for effectively using social media to get important messages across, and I may just use Causes’ suggestion of using my profile on my birthday as a way of getting my friends to get involved in things I believe in. But I don’t think getting them to support one of my causes on Facebook is the way to do it. Especially considering that the highest number of actions performed by any of my friends on Causes was a whopping 1.

I’d rather use the medium to bring about change in my own way (and to invite my friends over for a vegetarian birthday dinner).