Is Facebook a Tool for Chaos or Social Change?

Nancy Scola writes:

As an organizing tool, Facebook has had a couple of ugly weeks of late. Students at Michigan State University recently used Facebook to revive Cedar Fest, an old campus tradition that had been outlawed by local officials in the late 1980s after it frequently escalated from a party into something more akin to a riot. This time around, after violence ensued, East Lansing police officials vowed to hold those Facebook users accountable. News headlines ran along the lines of "Facebook: Tool for Chaos?" and the social-networking site was demonized as a means for the rabble to wreak havoc.

But it's only right to hold up the recent commotion in south-central Michigan against other Facebook-fueled collective action. It should be placed in context with how a Canadian university student named Alex Bookbinder has used the site to push back against state-sponsored violence in Burma. It must be judged against the worldwide attention to China's policy on Tibet that activists have used Facebook to generate in recent weeks. And it is only properly understood against the backdrop of those Colombian citizens, sick and tired of the fear that racks their country, who used Facebook to say no mas in more than one hundred cities on the very same day.

Facebook is revolutionizing the way collective political and social actions are organized today, blowing the doors off old models of how volunteer lists are amassed, funds raised, and messages honed and delivered. And no one is more surprised by that than Alex Bookbinder.

After traveling through Burma (also known as Myanmar) before his first year at university, Bookbinder returned home last fall and did something seemingly inconsequential: He initiated a Facebook group called Support the Monks' Protest in Burma to protest the Burmese military junta's harsh crackdown on the nation's religious caste. What's remarkable is that "global group" -- the social-networking site's parlance for designating a group open to all comers -- indeed became a global network of resistance.

Read the entire article on the AlterNet.