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| Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently met the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP |
If they are, they won't be Facebook. Facebook is profoundly anti-democratic, and not just because it is a commercial operation. Facebook politics involve no real commitment any more than sending an email does. Nothing could more quickly tell you that a cause was stupid or irrelevant than the news that a Facebook group has been formed about it which already has 4,000 members, unless it is an announcement that it has 40,000.
In countries where politics are a matter of life and death, Facebook, like Twitter, is a great tool in the hands of the secret police. The thoughtful Russian commentator Evgeny Morozov has pointed out how much the Iranian authorities benefited from the American enthusiasm for "the Twitter revolution" last summer. Social networking in China is as closely monitored by the government as any other form of social activity, and just as little likely to lead to lasting change.
But in the democratic west the problems of political and social engagement are different. The difficulty here is to get people to commit time and effort to a cause. Some forms of religions are good at this, normally in a destructive mode. This doesn't require Twitter or Facebook, or whatever the fashionable technology may be: all it needs is the internet. "Social networking" is something people do, and they will adapt almost any channel for the purpose. All that you need is the ability to make circles of mutual friendship (and enmity) online. That has been going on since at least 1985 in various forms.
Without the social networking made possible by email, there might have been no Anglican schism and – to move to something that matters – there would almost certainly be far less spread of jihadi ideology. The point is that these beliefs don't just come as ideas, such as you might read in a book, but as conversations, which are far more effective means of changing hearts and minds. Even those books which change our minds provoke imaginary conversations with the author. Online the process is much easier.
This will happen with or without government encouragement. Governments may not like it when it does. If there was anything more to Jeremy Hunt's meeting Mark Zuckerberg than the usual desire of politicians to hang around the glamorous and fashionable and rich, it was an idea, perhaps, that social networking would tell the government what people want. But the Big Society, if it means anything real, is about people telling government what to do – something less agreeable to politicians – and using social networks to make their instructions coherent and forceful.
This won't be a revolution. It will be an increase in the power of middle-class pressure groups, some of them environmental, some religious, some, no doubt, based around schools and groups of parents. Like the Alpha course, they may appear to be about conversion and evangelism (whether theistic or otherwise) but they will in fact be about deepening and strengthening the beliefs of the already converted, and acting them out in a social drama.
These are all things which Conservatives are in theory committed to wanting. Edmund Burke's "little platoons" reappear online. The trouble is that the little platoons don't really take orders from anyone. This doesn't mean that anarchists should take heart either – the real model for a little platoon online in all its quirky and dysfunctional splendour is the home guard of Walmington-on-Sea.
source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/22/facebook-big-society-mark-zuckerberg