Email and politics

Thu May 13 11:59:06 PDT 1999

x-no-archive: yes

========================

Do e-mail petitions work?

Chain letters and spam rarely impress politicians -- but they might
listen to a more personal breed of Web activism. 

Katherine Hobson
Salon.com 5/10/99

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." 

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 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." 

Web-based petitions, too, have shown an ability to harness public
sentiment and support. A petition protesting the Communications
Decency Act in 1995 collected 115,000 signatures, according to
Seiger. He helped organize both the petition and the related "black
page protest," in which many Web sites went dark to demonstrate
opposition to the law. More recently, the Censure and Move On
campaign -- founded by Joan Blades and her husband Web Boyd -- used a
Web-based petition to urge Congress to formally admonish President
Clinton and get on with its business, gathering 500,000 signatures
along the way. Move On also used e-mail to direct people to the
site, asking interested parties to send it only to friends and not
spam indiscriminately. "E-mail is a unique way for people to be
involved directly," says Blades, adding that the Web-based model
works best for single issues that attract a broad range of
participants. The Move On site now features a new Littleton,
Colo.-inspired petition, asking visitors to add their names in
support of the idea that it is time for government to accept its
proper role in regulating firearms.

Web-based petitions work because they have the potential to channel
protest to the most appropriate recipient, the sender's
representative or senator, says Chris Casey, a Congressional staffer
and author of "The Hill on the Net: Congress Enters the Information
Age." That's key, since a recent study shows that most members of
Congress don't pay attention to e-mail from outside the home
district. (Many legislators don't post their e-mail addresses and
some, like Dick Armey, have introduced elaborate forms to ensure that
their only communication is with their own constituents.) 

Meanwhile, other groups have discovered Web-based activism. Visitors
to Families USA can sign a petition urging their congressperson to
enact a patient's bill of rights. At the June 4 site (named for the
date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), visitors can add their names
to a petition protesting China's human rights record that will be
delivered to Chinese President Jiang Zemin, U.N. Secretary General
Kofi Annan and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary
Robinson. And Toledo, Ohio, voters can participate in a movement to
recall mayor Carty Finkbeiner -- although the site requires people to
print out the petition and physically sign it. "Opportunities in this
area are going to continue," predicts Casey. 

To be sure, it can be hard to pin down the results of online
activism. The Communications Decency Act ultimately passed Congress
(it was later ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court), while
Censure and Move On didn't convince Congress to do either. Though
organizers didn't achieve their political goals, they say they did
have an impact. Blades of Move On concedes that the petition got
very little direct feedback from Congress, but as signatures started
coming in, it seemed to bolster the Democrats to speak up against
impeachment. Move On also attracted $13.2 million in campaign
contributions, and volunteers pledged to spend a total of 750,000
hours supporting candidates who oppose those who voted for
impeachment. 

Meanwhile, Congress is getting more receptive to e-mail. A 1998
Bonner & Associates/American University survey of 270 Congressional
offices showed that 90 percent of the offices used e-mail, with most
of the others planning to do so within a year. 

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who co-founded and co-heads the
bipartisan Congressional Internet Caucus, pays attention to
electronic messages. "He's put e-mail on par with phone and mail
messages," says Leahy's spokesman David Carle. But not everyone is so
inclined. When considering a policy position, most Congressional
offices give the most weight to personal letters, followed by
personal visits, telephone calls, faxes, personal e-mails, paper
petitions, form letters, postcards and form e-mail, according to a
recent study by OMB Watch, a nonprofit group focusing on activities
at the Office of Management and Budget. 

Basically, congressional offices don't give equal weight to
preprinted, postage-paid postcards and handwritten, stamped letters,
and they apply that same framework to e-mail. "People think, 'Why
stop with my own congressperson? I can cc them all!' Somehow they
think they have a louder voice if they send it to every member of
Congress," says Casey. In fact, legislators treat such spam-like
messages the same way we all do.

Sites that use the "click here and e-mail every member of the U.S.
Senate" aren't effective, adds Casey, and "e-mail sent to everyone in
Congress is likely to be received by no one." To be counted, send it
to a single member -- either your own representative or a committee
head responsible for a particular issue. "E-mail, done right, has
every expectation of being received and responded to," he says. 

That response will still likely come by regular mail. And just 15
percent of the Congressional offices surveyed use e-mail to keep
constituents up-to-date on issues that may be important to them,
according to the Bonner/American University study. 

Casey is optimistic that e-mail and other forms of electronic
democracy are increasing participation, saying that there's no
indication that phone and letter contacts are going down. But he
urges people to think beyond the confines of e-mail petitions. When
e-mail doesn't provoke an anti-spam rage, or generate petition
fatigue, it can give people a false sense of having done something
worthwhile. "People end up feeling that they've had a voice," he
says. "In fact, they've been misled." 

E-mail activism actually follows the common-sense rules that govern
most communications. It can be effective -- but only when the medium
is used respectfully, by one individual or group making a sincere
attempt to share ideas with another. salon.com | May 10, 1999

About the writer:  Katherine Hobson is a staff reporter for
TheStreet.com and a freelance writer in New York. 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *  From the Listowner  * * * * * * * * * * * *
.	To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to:
majordomo at scn.org		In the body of the message, type:
unsubscribe scn
==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ====
* * * * * * *     http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/     * * * * * * *