About Face (book)

Wouldn't it be great if classes were cancelled the Monday after the Super Bowl?\nMore than 3,000 students think so, and they've employed Facebook to voice their opinion.\nPhysically gathering in one place to rally support for a cause might become a thing of the past as many students now join Facebook groups to show support, raise awareness and promote change for a wide variety of issues.\nFreshman Zac Foutz created the Facebook group "petition for IU to cancel classes after Super Bowl Sunday!" Foutz said he created the group not thinking it would get much attention, but the group had more than 3,600 members as of press time.\n"Right now, no one thinks it will work," Foutz said, "but with all this support, why not try it?"\nFoutz said he plans to go to Saturday's IU home basketball game with paper petitions to get signatures. He said he feels that petitions are not taken into consideration by college deans unless they are on paper with signatures.\nThe University has no formal policy about petitions because they are not part of formal decision-making processes, said Associate Vice President for Student Affairs Damon Sims.\n"Petitions are informal expressions of the sentiment of a population, so it doesn't really matter what form they're in," Sims said.\nWhile University officials might not be paying attention to Facebook, others are. Politicians are begining to use Facebook and other sites like it because of the ability to reach large amounts of people quickly.\nMany local candidates took advantage of the site during the 2006 midterm elections\n"Communicating with the 18- to 25-year-old demographic can be difficult," Cam Savage, spokesman for former 9th District Rep. Mike Sodrel, told the Indiana Daily Student in September 2006. "This allows us to talk to people who turn to the Internet before they turn on the radio or TV."\nFacebook's creators have taken special notice of petitions directed toward them.\nRicky Hawkins, a junior at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., said he created the group "Facebook has gone TOO far" in response to such site changes as the news feed, which was added at the beginning of the fall semester. Hawkins said his group got Facebook officials to listen.\n"We didn't get exactly what we wanted, but we were heard," Hawkins said.\nHawkins said he talked to Facebook officials who informed the group about some alternatives. He felt his group was successful because its purpose was to get Facebook's administrators to listen to their users and\nrespond accordingly.\nFinding time to raise awareness and support for a cause can consume a lot of time, which is a luxury some students don't have.\n"You're always going to have people that want to get involved with an issue but don't have time," said Andrew Warshauer, a senior at the International School of Indiana, a high school in Indianapolis.\nWarshauer's group "Indiana Students to Save Darfur" has allowed him to relay information from larger international groups to students. Spreading information is also the purpose of the group "College Students Calling for The End of the Genocide in Darfur," said group officer Jonathan Zinszer, a freshman at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.\n"If this group has aided in informing people about the injustice in Darfur, then I do view it as a success," Zinszer said.\nZinszer said a woman sent him a message him last week, both for more information on the genocide in Darfur and to ask if there if there was anything more than donating money she could do to support the cause.\nFacebook groups can be anything from fun to informative or even offensive. Either way, they provide a good sense of what students are interested in and what motivates them, said Thomas Brewster Trudgeon, a freshman at the University of California at San Diego who created the group "MAKE THE WEARING OF REALLY REALLY LARGE SUNGLASSES ILLEGAL."\n"That's why I love these Facebook groups, because I love seeing what different students around the world have to say about different topics," Trudgeon said in an e-mail.