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[ Prev | Next | Index | Search | Home ] 2/22/96, Northampton, MA, USA
Fighting the Chill of the Info Age
by Paul Bissex, biscuit@well.com
Welcome to my whistle stop on Dave Winer's "24 Hours of
Democracy" tour.
The following is taken from my weekly newspaper column, Cyberia:
Fighting the Chill. It's a story of using the Net in a democratic
and international spirit. It's also a cautionary tale.
--------------------------------------
Petitioning the World
"STOP NUCLEAR TESTS!" it said, in huge block letters that filled
the screen. I was in charge of forwarding e-mail messages
submitted to an activists' mailing list, and was intrigued by
this one from Japan. Below the banner it said:
"This is a chain letter to urge the French government
to stop nuclear tests. If you agree with us, please add
your name to the bottom of the list, below, and send
copies to your friends. We will add up the lists that
had (sic) come back to us, and send it to the French
Government."
The English wasn't perfect, but the message was clear. At the
bottom was a list of names, all students at the University of
Tokyo.
Remember hearing the words in the old shampoo commercial, "...and
they told two friends, and so on, and so on," as you watched the
screen fill up with happy faces? Well, picture how fast that
screen fills up when telling ten friends is as easy as telling
two, and instead of having to wait until you run into your
friends during the week, you can send them an exact copy of the
e-mail as soon as you've read it. If each new set of recipients
acted on the students' message within 12 hours by sending out
just three more copies, within three days the message would have
arrived in over 700 new mailboxes -- and almost five million by
the end of a week.
Powerful stuff. So, what if it gets out of control and you want
to stop it?
When I finished reading, I thought for a while about the massive
task the students would face in collating lists of names from
around the world, and about stories of computer crashes resulting
from e-mail overload. I sent an e-mail message to them, and
quickly got a form reply. Apparently I was not the first to voice
these concerns. In fact, it seemed that, just nineteen days after
they started it, the petition was already beyond control:
"Thank you very much for those of you who have pointed
out the troublesomeness (sic) about the chain letter. I
have decided to stop collecting signatures by using
chain letter, but then, I have to use the same method
to stop it..."
A notice I received from them two weeks later put it this way:
"We have sent our second chain letter to go after the
first one, since that was the only way we could think
of to stop the first one from spreading. However this
is not working so well, and now many sites around world
is (sic) having unnecessarily high traffics and are
getting into troubles (sic)."
The problem is, the retraction is forever on the heels of the
original message. By the time someone gets the retraction they
probably have already sent out the original petition. And by the
time they send the retraction to their friends, those friends may
have already forwarded the petition too. It's possible that both
of these messages will continue making the rounds for years (or
at least until the French stop doing nuclear bomb tests,
whichever comes first).
Last week I received another copy of the petition. I told the
friend who sent it to me about the retraction, then went back and
checked out the list of names. The first dozen or so were the
same as on the copy I had received over four months earlier. But
from there they were totally different. Scrolling down through
the list of names and locations, I could follow the message's
path around the world. From Japan it had gone to France, then
Holland, then back to France, then over to Germany, down to New
Zealand and Australia, then on a tour of American colleges, two
or three Italian universities, and finally back to America where,
188 names long, it found me. I didn't pass it on, but I was glad
that others had.
It's fitting that, in the 50th anniversary year of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, some Japanese graduate students would try to wave a
flag for peace. The best part about this story is that for all
the technical troubles, those two students and their friends have
remained dedicated to their cause. In August they delivered over
50,000 names to the French embassy in Tokyo, and they aren't
finished yet.
***
Note: Since this column was first published, France has declared
that it has run its last nuclear bomb tests. The petitioners are
still going, though, focusing on other countries that contintue
to test. --PB
Sites in my Sights
You can visit the site yourself and learn more about the history
of the petition (so you know what to say when it shows up in your
e-mail box) by pointing your web browser to
http://www.iijnet.or.jp/nuke/.
Don't Just Sit There, Sit There and Do Something
As I trolled the Web finding sites related to banning nuclear
weapons, the fact that so many of them are located in Japan
became itself a grim historical reminder. Both of the bombed
cities have powerful web sites
(http://www.nagasaki-noc.or.jp/na-bomb/na-bombe.html and
http://www.city.hiroshima.jp/).
Copyright 1995 by Paul Bissex
-----------------------------------------------------------------
There's still time to
add an essay to the
chain! Dave has
reopened registration
using an improved
web-based form. It will
[24 Hours of Democracy] go off the air on
2/28/96 at midnight. So
write your essay, put
it on the web, and
register. See the 24
Hours of Democracy home
page to learn more.
To search all the 24 Hours of Democracy essays
(courtesy of Webcrawler),
enter some key words in the box and hit "Search."
Keywords for this page:
"Northampton",
"Massachusetts",
"Bissex",
"Nuclear",
"Japan",
"France",
"Chirac"