The Israel/Gaza Facebook War

Status Updates on Facebook have a whole new tone to them these days. While usually a barometer as to how hungover/ready for happy hour a person is, in the past week these innocuous little descriptors have been replaced by some heavy war-petting, Israel style. I'm no stranger to politically-tinged updates myself. I've been known to throw some perhaps obnoxiously strong opinions next to my name, but I hope they aren't as blatantly inhumane as some of the taglines that I've seen listed next to my Facebook "friend's" names:

John Doe is GO ISRAEL GO! is proud of Israel! is KILL THEM ALL!

Often written all in caps, each of these updates is followed by a barrage of commentary, both in support and derision of the original sentiment.

Personally, it has turned into a bit of a conundrum. My first instinct was to delete the people making these statements from my friend list as a way to scourge my social networking of what I consider to be offensive slurs against a group of people, the Palestinians. But then, as I was about to get rid of the first culprit, I wondered if by doing so I would be ending a potentially important conversation. Maybe I'm taking this all too seriously. Maybe it's only freaking Facebook. But (forgive the Carrie Bradshaw-esque tone) I have to wonder, if this is our new way of communicating, how much influence does a Status Update have on our culture?

Comments

[daf81289]

One thing you forgot is the posting of donated statuses to Qassam Count. I outline the practice here: http://www.readingpulitzer.com/2009/01/08/facebook-and-the-gaza-war/

[mosey]

At least these people aren't posting this stuff anonymously. Facebook status updates are necessarily constrained by the limited number of characters that can be used. They are, like all discourse, further constrained by whatever ideology happens to prevail inside the political soul of the interface user. Facebook is just a technology. We can use it in whatever ways we like, although there are of course trends in use, and standard protocols that emerge in a sort of shared way.
Rigid ideologues are going to be rigid ideologues on or off-line, but may be encouraged to be more so online -- or they may engender such behavior in other users. YOU, on the other hand, can equally work to shape the ways in which we use our status updates. I DO think they can be important, because a conversation is necessarily going to start, even if it's not with that person. Clearly you have brought this to the table, and we're already fostering a dialogue (meta-meta-meta) ;)
Moreover, the content of the Israel-Palestine conflict has not been know to give rise to a whole lot of circumspection in any kind of broad public way. Maybe we can start status updating in some super-democratizing way, like: Jessica Olien encourages everyone to be generous and consider humane behavior in all parts of the world. Then again, we could all go back to: Jessica Olien is NYC crizzunkeded up in the hizzy, wooooooooo­oooooooooo­oo!"