Digital Dissenter

We all hate chain emails that threaten to curse us for the next few years if we don’t forward them to 15 friends in the next five minutes. Email petitions are however a form of chain mail that becomes a little harder to ignore. These petitions function by appealing to one’s conscience rather than one’s superstitions.

  
Online petitions that one finds in one’s inbox are often cleverly constructed to pull on the heart strings and spur one on to ‘action’. Action is in inverted commas because while I have sometimes been ‘that friend’ who forwards the email to my entire friend-list, when I’m not overly emotional and feeling helpless about the plight of the whales/ greyhounds/ [insert worthy cause here], I’m skeptical about the efficacy of this form of digital activism.

I came across a ‘mathematical proof that email petitions don’t work’. It’s really simple: let’s say you start a petition and email it to five friends. Now on each of those petitions your name will be the first on the petition, and your friends will then each add their names as number two. So there are now five versions of the same petition. Those five friends then forward the email to five of their friends and so it goes on until there are literally millions of versions of the same petition by the tenth time someone hits ‘forward’.

You may be thinking well that’s fine – the person who started the petition can wade through all the repetition and formulate the final petition when they receive all the other versions back. No matter how strongly someone feels about saving the whales, there is simply no way that they would be able to make sense of over a million copies. It’s also worth considering the fact that the email address that the petitions are supposed to be sent back to will no longer work since it will go over its quota if it receives all the emails back.

If you receive an email petition about a particular cause, it is better to go to the website of the organization concerned and look for the online petitions that are embedded on the site. That is of course if you really believe that giving your digital signature will result in some kind of real change. 

E-petitions, whether on a website or sent via email, have been called just another manifestation of slacktivism in a society in which people are eager to find ways to feel better about themselves without having to exert any effort or spend any money. It seems as if online petitions, in their many forms, serve more of a purpose for the people who ‘sign’ them, rather than for the actual cause itself.

Certain uses of online petitions are however relatively more effective than others and I can’t do justice to the argument for online petitions here, so next week I will look specifically at care2 and its model of digital activism.