California Insider

I think this budding dispute involving FaceBook, a MySpace-style web community that caters to students, has implications for the future of online politics. The short story is that the creators of FaceBook made some changes that the users didn't like. Overnight, hundreds of thousands of them responded, demanding that the changes be rescinded. This is how the youth of America are learning to communicate and network and get their way. For now they are focused on something we might think is frivolous, although I wouldn't necessarily characterize personal relationships that way. Especially for college students, relationships are about the most important thing in their lives. When other things become just as important, look for them to increasingly use these same kind of networking impulses to express their views...