[sacw] Salon Technology | Do e-mail petitions work?

[Harsh Kapoor]

August 2, 1999
FYI
(South Asia Citizens Web / South Asians Against Nukes)
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http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/05/10/petitions/index.html

Do e-mail petitions work?
Chain letters and spam rarely impress politicians -- but they might listen
to a more personal breed of Web activism.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Katherine Hobson

May 10, 1999 | You've probably received an e-mail petition protesting
a proposal to cut Congressional funding for public broadcasting and the
arts. In fact, you've likely received it more than once.

What you may not know is that it has been making the rounds since 1995,
when two University of Northern Colorado freshmen -- who, like most people
at the time, were new to the Internet -- e-mailed it to their friends.
Recipients were supposed to tack on their names, pass it along and --
after every 50th signature -- forward a copy to the authors.

The petition snowballed, and not in a good way. The university's server was
inundated with replies, many of them venomous.

"A lot of people consider those things spam," says a programmer at the
university's information services department, who asked not to be
identified. "There were a lot of suggestions as to what to do with the
creators, most of them not very kind."

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These days lawmakers could live in their districts and convene online. Why
won't they give up the Beltway?

The pair's frosh mistake was to presume that flooding e-mail inboxes with a
well-intentioned petition would be well received. But as this ceaselessly
circulating petition and
<http://www.salon.com/tech/log/1999/04/28/chain_letters/index.html>many
others have shown, e-mail activism doesn't always have a WD-40 effect on
the wheels of participatory democracy: It backfires as often as it
succeeds. The secret to making online activism effective seems to be
knowing when to turn to e-mail and what to use it for.

There is, of course, a distinction to be made between using e-mail to
communicate and using it to reproduce spam-like petitions. Chain letters
have proven themselves to be fairly useless; more sophisticated petitions,
posted to a Web site that collects signatures, have garnered more respect.

Plenty of people argue that e-mail simply doesn't lend itself direct
communication between the people and their representatives. "You want to
make noise as an advocate -- you want the walls to shake," says Jonah
Seiger, co-founder of Mindshare Internet Campaigns, a Washington new-media
political consulting firm. "E-mail has no weight, no mass. It comes in
quietly."

Seiger says e-mail is best used by an organization to communicate with its
members. "It's the single most important tool in its ability to keep people
informed and keep them interested in something," he says. Groups ranging
from the World Wildlife Federation to the National Rifle Association have
e-mail action alert lists, and many provide standardized letters on
hot-button issues that can be edited and then sent to members of Congress
by e-mail or fax.

But some groups say e-mail's uses go beyond information and mobilization --
it can also bring concrete results. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group
(U.S. PIRG) uses e-mail to rally support for its Arctic wilderness
campaign. The effort aims to prevent oil drilling in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge, which the group claims is the only area along Alaska's
north slope not open for oil and gas drilling. By urging university
students to e-mail British Petroleum, ARCO and Chevron (Exxon, as far as
U.S. PIRG can tell, has no public e-mail address) and ask them to cancel
their drilling plans, the group has sparked three separate waves of e-mail
protest.

"We got their attention and held it," says Athan Manuel, director of the
campaign. A month after the first Arctic action day, the group got a call
from BP, its biggest target, he says. "We've met with them three or four
times now, and each time, we met with someone more and more senior -- the
last meeting was even with someone who was British! That was a first."