Social Network Update VII - For A Good Cause

I thought I'd take some time to plug a social network cause that's actually having a big impact on my out-of-class life at the moment. As many of you may know, we here at CCT are in a potentially drawn-out fight to get another full-time media and politics professor hired for next fall. Without going into too many details, things aren't looking exactly rosy. Thus, in the spirit of online activism, we decided to go to the internet as a means of organizing the masses.

When we decided to go online, however, we were faced with a dilemma: exactly how would we structure our movement, and what tools would we use to get our message out and action taken?

Since our campaign was going to be fairly local and specialized, we decided that a combination of private communications and information offers and public action opportunities would be the best way to alert our peers to our problem and give them a chance to help us out. To this end, we decided to use two tool that have become quite familiar to readers of this blog: Facebook and Care2.

Since our outreach was going to be targeted at members of our specific peer group, the four of us behind the campaign began by sending out Facebook messages to all of our contacts at Georgetown and other Consortium universities. Facebook allowed us to reach people who we were already connected to and to inform them of where the situation stood regarding our need for a professor.

However, Facebook alone was not sufficient. Since it is not designed with activism in mind, it lacks easily adaptable features for action-related activity. We could've had people join a group or an event (which we did create to serve as an advertisement), but that wouldn't have the same impact as something more intuitively designed. It would've also restricted activity to out peers who were already signed up to use Facebook - not exactly the best strategy in this case. Thus, we turned to another website to give our supporters an easy way to help us: Care2's Petition Site.

We created this petition, copying the appeals that we'd used in the Facebook message and event portions of the campaign, and set a deadline for signatures. Once people began to respond, we sent out blast messages to everyone who had yet to sign the petition, and continued to advertise it in away messages and status updates on AIM, Facebook, and GChat. In the end, after circulating the petition around our limited target group for two weeks, we ended up collecting 80 signatures. We've submitted the petition to the head of our program, and are now waiting to hear back.

UPDATE (4/2): Well, a response came down. From unnamed sources come reports of an emergency staff meeting in which the most vocal member of our little group was been labeled "a troublemaker", our petition as "crummy", and our definition of media and politics as grossly lacking.

(Side note: for a program so enamored with technology, the idea that a technology-oriented petition would be ridiculed by the very people pushing these techno-Utopian pronouncements strikes me as off. If we'd written this in a paper instead of targeted it at them, they'd be falling over themselves to help us publish.)

However, for all of the unprofessional cheap shots, we've also heard that a new professor will indeed be hired to teach media and politics at CCT this fall. So, though we may be firebrands, we're at least successful firebrands.