Searching for community online
[ Back to "Come together right now - but where?" ]
Friday
Time for action. I launch my Web browser and head over to E-the People (www.e-thepeople.com), which describes itself as America's interactive town hall. E-the People is a nonpartisan company that aims to bring together activists around the process of writing and signing petitions. The company claims to have the capability to deliver these petitions to more than 170,000 local, state, and federal officials in more than 9,800 cities. What's funding this operation? The advertising revenue from the banner ads that are served on the site.
The opening page of E-the People gives me a choice of a few dozen petition topics, from agriculture to youth. The most recent petitions are prominently displayed: Do I want to decriminalize marijuana? Reduce the US forces in the Balkans? Stop the harassment of Marilyn Manson? Petitions are ready and waiting for me to sign.
I choose ''elections and campaign financing'' from a drop-down menu. Now I'm looking at five petitions. The first one, ''Support Jello for president,'' already has 96 electronic signatories. It asserts that Eric Boucher, a.k.a. Jello Biafra, has ''all the right skills to be president.'' I decide to give the issue more consideration before committing my e-signature. Moving down the list of petitions, I encounter more earnest initiatives advocating campaign finance reform, the legalization of the domestic ferret, and the right of motorists in Houston to turn right on Main Street downtown. Then I move on to consider another 70 petitions at another e-mail activist site, www.ifnotnow.com.
The process doesn't feel anything like negotiating a clipboard, a pen, a few bags of groceries, and a speed- rapping activist outside the local supermarket, but as long as the opinions make their way to their intended destination, I'm willing to give one-stop cyber-activism a try.
|
