I'm going to piggyback off Michael Whitney's news of Facebook's decision to swap political identities for party labels, and say: what a strange and misguided choice.

First off, I know money talks, but I'm not exactly sure why this change would even be that appealing to marketers, as Michael posits. It seems to me that there's more cash to be made from, say, American Apparel being able to target progressives in Texas than there is empowering some Joe Schmoe congressional candidate in Ohio to reach potential voters. But I might be missing something on that point, and would love to hear what it is.

That said, this has to have been a decision made by Facebook's marketing department, because it seems to run so counter to the idea that that Facebook is a tool for building community and social networks in the U.S. or abroad. In-network party identification doesn't mean all that much when we're talking Democrat vs. Republican in the United States -- I for one can count on one hand the number of my Facebook friends whose party leanings I don't already know from our other interactions. But Facebook's old "political views" option keyed me in to who considers themselves "very liberal" and who thinks of themselves as "moderate." With labels like that, we knew more about our social worlds coming out of Facebook than we did going into it.

But more than that, limiting how people self-identify politically to party labels is, in my opinion, such a strange, disconnected, and ultimately sad understanding of what this politics thing is all about. "Progressive" or "conservative" or even "independent" are world views, missions, weltanschauungs. "Democrat" or "Republican" is what we are in the voting booth a couple times a year. (Little "i" independents really get the short stick here, shunted into the Independence Party of America.) And what of those self-defined liberations, so many of whom live on the West Coast and work in tech? They may well support candidates from either party when election time rolls around, but now they're funneled into the "Libertarian Party of America" in Facebook land.

Our political identities are defining ways of interacting with the world that we live in and orienting ourselves in it. And if politics isn't about more than what which box we check on our voting registration card, we're ceding control to some money-driven establishment organization based in Washington or in our state capitols. That, it seems to me, to run completely counter to the decentralized, idea-driven networked world in which Facebook has become such a major player.