Digital Dissenter

Last week’s post looked at the problem with petitions as a form of digital activism. The issue of perpetuating an ethos of ‘slacktivism’ or armchair activism has come up many times, and so far the picture painted of online activism has been somewhat grim. Surely there are ways in which the online platform can be harnessed successfully to drive social change?

Care2 is one activist website which seems to have the right idea. Founder and CEO of Care2, Randy Paynter, staunchly defends the efficacy of online petitions in particular. Following the spread of email petitions in the late 90’s, Paynter started thePetitionSite.com in 2000 as a way to better channel all the energy and good intentions that were being lost in cyberspace. The website functions as a central repository for signatures with added fraud prevention and the assurance that the petitions will be delivered to the relevant authority figures. Paynter states: “We created a tool that has forced politicians, businesses and organisations large and small to face the power of their constituents”.

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.