Who cares if the results have already been made public?

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I don't know how many times I've been invited to vote against Hitler as Time Magazine's Man of the Century, but it's at least in the tens. At least two of those times, the urgent message explaining how important my vote was, arrived after Time had announced that Einstein had been chosen. In a similar manner, I've been encouraged to sign a petition to save the Brazilian rain forests, or protect women in Afghanistan, numerous times. My sympathies are definitely with the rain forests and with Afghani women, but I find it hard to sign these petitions, and not only because in numerous cases I've already done so long before these recycled petitions reached me. (It would be nice if these petitions carried dates indicating when they were begun and when the collection of names is supposed to stop. To my mind that would add a bit of credibility to them.)

E-mail makes it easy to sign a petition. To my mind, too easy. One-click shopping may be an idea whose time has come, but one-click political commitment seems to be lacking precisely because it's "one-click". Expressing opinions is important, but if it's done within a multi-tasking environment in which you're reading your e-mail, surfing the web for a good deal on a new computer, writing a paper, and playing a computer game, it seems to lack a certain necessary element of commitment. So I'll take this opportunity to beg forgiveness from any readers who send me petitions urging me to sign them and pass them on to everyone that I know. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but in the vast majority of cases, the buck stops here.

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Go to: The life cycle of an urban legend, or
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