Lately I have been thinking about what it takes to get involved a lot. Like many people I think I always find that doing so requires of me slightly more energy than I want to take at that moment. To make my thoughts known I must get them organized, determine where or who to send them to, write an email and send them. At the end of this I am left wondering if my effort will really make a difference or if that email will be trashed and ignored.
Projects like Mozilla seem as if they could offer at least a partial solution to some of this. An addon could hold information on where you lived and email address for your representatives and government officials downloaded. Activism oriented sites could set up a download area from which position statements on issues could be downloaded. The header would contain who it was recommended to send it to. If this was to a local representative the addon would automaticly fill in the correct email. Copies of what was sent would be held in a glorified email folder which would keep track of what was sent and could be set up to prompt you to resend statements once every six months or however often you felt they warranted sending.
An example of this could be downloading positions papers from several different sites. The addon would check where they needed to be sent to, check how often they recommend I resend them, ask me if I wanted to be prompted to resend them after that time period, attach my contact information if I wanted it to and send them.
This is obviously the lazy way of doing things. While the fact remains that the emails may get ignored there are still several benefits. The first is that it may get more people involved and thinking about those issues. To encourage involvement activism sites could also provide free pop email for their members. This would incur an added expense, however the cost would be shared between activism sites, and might not be as great as one would think. For instance while I might be interested a number of different issues I would probably only be interested in having one pop email and choose to get it from the site that promotes the issues I'm interested in best. From that site I would send out all of my email. This would promote the sites visibility and my views whenever I sent email and perhaps get more people involved. Given my greater involvement it would not be a stretch that I would donate to the site, especially when given encouragement. After all they would be providing me with free email and I agree with there beliefs. This I think would more than cover the costs the sites incurred to provide the free pop email.
What are your thoughts?
Re: A Way to Increase Activism?
I liked the idea in principle here, but I found it interesting you are proposing a less active form of activism, to increase activism :)
One question, though, if representatives realize that people could use such a plugin and thus make less effort in contacting them, wouldn't it be likely that they might pay attention even less to what we have to say?
Re: A Way to Increase Activism?
I did think of this. My hope would be that a vast increase in traffic might make them take note regardless. The other thought I had would be that an organization could be set up that though which people would send email that would verify that this was the only email coming from that person about that topic within the specified time frame.
The organization would have to verify either through a public id card, fingerprint etc. that this was a unique individual. When the email was sent to it, it would forward it and note the address it was to. If a 2nd email was sent from that person to that same address within that time period it would note it at the top of the email. At the end of the time period the addresses it had stored would be deleted. It could also verify a person was from a particular district if that was important. However it would not be necessary for it to forward the persons original email address or name. This would only be included if the sender had included it in the address. The idea would be to keep a minimum amount of data about any given person out of any permanent database (because of privacy concerns) but verify that someone wasn't spamming their congressman/woman or whoever.
Re: A Way to Increase Activism?
You can visit Moveon.org to see if they're doing the type of work you describe. They generate "electronic advocacy" campaigns that organize individuals to send emails and sign petitions and such, also allowing easy donation to sympathetic political candidates and providing updates of political events. Usually, users receive an emial with a link to a form letter Moveon.org produces that users can send easily from the Moveon.org website automatically to the user's leaders in the Senate or Congress on specific issues, even providing a field for users to add additional text to personalize their letter.
I agree with you that there is a lot of potential for the facilitation of activism on the internet, though I think this has to be tempered with a concern for local issues, which I think sites like Moveon.org simply can't address. If such software were developed to help activists organize, I would like to see easy ways for local leaders to form campaigns and provide updates easily to smaller groups.
Re: A Way to Increase Activism?
I, like the above posters, agree that the internet can be used to facilitate activism, and that it has been, with different degrees of success. The ideas in your post are good - increasing activism and involvement usually is, in my opinion.
On the other hand, I think that the kind of automated system described may lead to an increse in what I think of as "push-button" or "point-and-click" activism, and while this may increase volume of responses sent to legislators, etc., I don't think this is necessarily the most effective form of activism. Unfortunately, I think activism requires just that, active engagement with issues, and I don't think this kind of active engagement and reflection is encouraged by online petitions and pre-generated emails to elected officials.
I also share the concern that EMason expressed - online activism seems to focus on national/international issues, not local, and that's a concern.
Thoughts?
Re: A Way to Increase Activism?
I agree with all concerns expressed. International is easier than local because of sheer numbers if nothing else. However web sites about local issues can be set up and use what I described. To combat the point and click mentality it could also be done slightly differently so that you would receive a write up about the pros and cons of an issue, and it would fill in who it needed to go to in an email but then would leave the rest of the email to the individual. This would force people to go over issues more in there minds which I like better.
Re: A Way to Increase Activism?
I'm sort of interested in the sorts of activism that Howard Rheingold talks about in Smart Mobs, where people organize using cell phones and all pop up at demonstrations, etc. I just want to be a drone in the hive, as it were.
Re: A Way to Increase Activism?
I like all that has been said here; I'm glad people are at least thinking about activism.