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Important Update: In response to a June 2005 vote by a Congressional subcommittee to eliminate federal funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the political action group MoveOn.org has launched a new email campaign titled "This Time It's for Real: Save NPR and PBS." Though the Moveon.org message urges concerned parties to add their names to a petition hosted on the group's Web site, it is not an "email petition" like the one described below. Read more...
Once upon a time — the year was 1995, to be exact — two well-meaning but naive young students at the University of Northern Colorado decided to express their concern over cuts in federal funding for the arts and public broadcasting by starting an email petition. In their earnest Internet opus they cited facts and figures concerning the costs of keeping the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio in business, raised the specter of Republican threats to cut funding for these programs and begged recipients to "sign" the document by appending their names before forwarding it off to everyone they know. The concept had a few fatal flaws: First, no one in any position of authority takes email petitions seriously. Electronic "signatures" are meaningless, no matter how many hundreds of thousands may be collected. Second, the University of Northern Colorado was displeased to find its email system deluged with responses to what was essentially a chain letter, and shut the students' email address down. And finally, there was one small technical problem the students hadn't foreseen: there was no way to stop or recall the petition once its purpose had been served. All this had become painfully clear within two weeks of its launch, but by then it was too late to turn back — the beast had taken on a life of its own. Fast-forward to 1998, three years later. By now, the petition has seen the inside of a million or more modems. It has been rewritten by forwarders in numerous inventive ways, most notoriously by the addition of the blurb, "Save Sesame Street!" (Who could turn down a plea to save Sesame Street?) Though perhaps marginally relevant at the outset, at least in terms of alerting a vast number of people to right-wing threats against federal funding for the arts, by 1998 it has long since stopped serving any useful purpose. And despite repeated pleas from the authors and their university for a halt to the re-mailings, the petition remains in wide, constant circulation to this day, all across the Internet, all around the world. Why, I happen to have a copy of it right here:
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