Posted by News and Observer Inexpensive, unobtrusive and edging closer to ubiquity every day, e-mail -- and the Internet that carries it -- are fast becoming the activist tool of choice. Any questions? Ask the Rev. Paul Scott of Durham's New Righteous Movement. Last year, Scott waged an Internet campaign against CBS when it aired a miniseries with a white actor playing Jesus. Staff writer Christina Dyrness can be reached at 829-4649 or cdyrness@newsobserver.com
on 10/8/2001, 6:25 am
Fwd: for the cause
E-mail makes grass-roots activism easy
By CHRISTINA DYRNESS, Staff Writer
Scott, who preaches what he calls Afrikan Liberation Theology, wanted to dispute the notion that Jesus was white, but found typical venues such as newspaper columns or talk radio considered the topic too controversial. So he used a computer and Internet access at the public library to post articles to online discussion lists focusing on religious and African-American issues.
"I'm from the hip-hop era," says Scott, who has also waged campaigns against violent rap lyrics and a brand of malt liquor. "They used to get their raps out there any way they could. E-activism is just one of the tools we use."
If you're still not convinced, talk to Pam Hartley, vice president of programs at the Exploris museum in Raleigh. Last month, Exploris and N.C. State University put together a forum to discuss the political and historic background that led to the terrorist attacks Sept. 11.
Knowing that there was limited time to get the word out, Hartley called on a vast e-mail network of personal and professional contacts to send electronic copies of the event flier. Of 250 people who showed up, most said they found out about the event from e-mail messages.
"It wasn't just the vehicle of e-mail; it was e-mail mixed with a topic that was galvanizing the general public," Hartley says.
Welcome to the world of e-activism. It's based on the assumption that when people get e-mail about something that concerns them, they respond.
And since the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the Internet has solidified its role as a place for people to seek or spread information, support or oppose various causes, and stir up interest in hot-button issues.
Though unwanted e-mail, or spam, has emerged as the scourge of the Internet and rumors run rampant online, targeted e-activism has flourished. Its proponents say that e-mail is one better than a phone call: It's basically free, and folks can deal with it on their own time.
Becky Risher is an example of someone for whom e-activism is the only option. Chief marketing officer at Morton + Beck, an interactive marketing and public-relations firm in Raleigh, and mother of a 1-year-old son, Risher doesn't have a lot of time left over for neighborhood politics.
But when a developer planned a three-story townhouse complex in her Five Points neighborhood of bungalows, Risher got interested. She signed a petition and gave her e-mail address to the neighborhood committee, which tracked the townhouse design approval process and announced meetings when the plans would be reviewed by city officials.
"There are probably 100 people, young and old, on the e-mail list," says Risher, whose neighborhood is still monitoring the development. For Risher, if it wasn't for the concise updates delivered by e-mail, she admits she probably wouldn't be up to date on the issue.
"It's been really such an easy way for me to be involved," Risher says. "Between my work and my son, it's the only way to be able to be up on something."
Activists of all stripes are learning about the limited-time factor.
When developer Neal Coker proposed a development for the intersection of Oberlin Road and Wade Avenue in Raleigh, his plans raised the ire of neighborhood activists, who promptly put up a Web site, www.notowers.com and organized an opposition that relied heavily on e-mail alerts. Though it might not have been the e-mail and Web site that did it, the opposition was successful: Coker scrapped his project.
Thanks to that high-profile development debate, the coming local elections in Raleigh are dealing heavily with growth issues.
Perry Woods, campaign manager for Charles Meeker's bid for the Raleigh mayoral spot, has seen an increase in the number of people signing up for e-mail alerts. "Two years ago the whole e-mail list was just two or three hundred," says Woods, who managed Meeker's unsuccessful campaign for mayor in 1999. "Now it's close to 2,000.
"Asking for people's e-mail is something we automatically do," says Woods, who adds that the campaign keeps its messages short and doesn't send unsolicited e-mail.
"There's still a lot of people who aren't online, so it's not universal," Woods says. "But in the years to come it will probably be more and more popular."
It isn't so popular with Raleigh's current mayor. Mark Stevens, campaign consultant for Raleigh Mayor Paul Coble's re-election bid, says the mayor made a decision to avoid e-mail in favor of personal contact such as meetings and phone calls. Though Coble has a Web site, Stevens said the mayor prefers the personal touch.
And Raleigh mayoral candidate Joel Cornette, an IBM executive, doesn't send out e-mail alerts but uses his Web site as a forum for site visitors to chime in on issues.
Indeed, e-mail can be intrusive -- and spam is the e-activist's enemy. Truly savvy activists are careful to use, not abuse, e-mail for fear of diluting its effectiveness.
Bill Cobey, chairman of the state Republican party, has thousands on his contact list but sends e-mail sparingly. "We don't flood people with e-mails because we think the point is, if you flood people with e-mails, they stop opening them."
Universities, where students are given e-mail addresses as soon as they step on campus, have been using the Internet as a de facto public address system for years.
"College students have probably in a way perhaps blazed a trail to use technology for activism," says Rudy Kleysteuber, student body vice president and a senior biology major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He recalls a sit-in at the chancellor's office to protest sweatshops two years ago that was arranged using e-mail lists and monitored by a Web camera.
This fall, when students returned they received a message from student government alerting them to a retroactive tuition increase and urging them to e-mail their state representatives.
They also set up laptops with wireless Internet access that students could use on their way to class.
Michael Tucker, chief relationship officer at a Web design shop in Raleigh, Hesketh.com, says he's never written his congressman a letter, but he's e-mailed all of his representatives at one time or another.
"The written letter used to be a mainstay of how people communicate, and it's gone away," Tucker says. "E-mail has some of the permanence of a letter and some of the informality of face-to-face communication."
Tucker says e-mail's popularity came to the forefront after Sept. 11 when people's in-boxes were filled with personal messages from family and friends, rumors and urban myths about the terrorist attacks, and requests for both peace and war.
As head of the Hillsborough Street Partnership, a neighborhood group in Raleigh, Nina Szlosberg believes strongly in e-mail's effectiveness. Folks interested in the Hillsborough project number well into the hundreds and the list keeps growing.
Szlosberg, however, chafes a little at the term "activist."
"For whatever reason, that has a certain connotation," she says. "I really see it as e-communication."
The Internet is just a means, as paper always has been, to give people the information they need to make decisions, Szlosberg says. "I'm a big believer in the information age. Ignorance is bliss in some ways -- the more you know, the more you have to be involved."
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