Clicktivism

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Israeli environmentalists, headed by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, have been fighting the plans to establish three new towns in the natural vast lands of East Lachish for over a year now. Next week, the highest instance of the planning authorities in Israel will debate the plan for the third and last town (the other two have already been approved).

Like in too many other cases, the SPNI has tried to gain proven public support through the use of an online petition. Exactly the same way people tend to believe that Israelis are highly politically involved just because politics is one of the most common chat topics around, SPNI were hoping to show they have massive public support behind them with yet another e-petition set on their website. It’s been quite a long time that I’ve been claiming that traditional protest methods, and especially internet petitions, are no use.

In this case, the manager of the southern district of the Ministry of Construction and Housing provided the ultimate example. In his answer to the SPNI’s formal claim that one cannot ignore 12,000 signatures on an internet petition, he implied to the Israeli version of “American Idol”, where 11,269 virtual signatures were demanding the comeback of one of the competitors.

And he’s absolutely right. In many cases these petitions are everything but reliable since even a newbie can easily distort the results. Moreover, in lots of the internet petitions people can easily sign with either pseudonym, initials or even with false data, if at all, time and time again. Furthermore, this kind of activism already suffers a critical inflation when websites like “atzuma” (Hebrew for petition) offer establishing any kind of petition, from calls to bring different artists to perform in Israel to a demand for reducing the prices of printers ink cartridges.

But stakeholders tend to degrade this so-called citizen participation because they perfectly know that the majority of the people signing these virtual petitions are in no way committed to their causes. In fact, issuing an e-petition would actually be the perfect way to remove support, since for most of the signers, their active participation for whatever cause it is ends up with clicking on that “I support” button, while cleansing their conscious with the comfort feeling of self-satisfaction of contributing to society.

When asked what’s actually the aim of these initiatives, activists tend to answer “raising awareness” or “reaching the media”. Well, in already way too many cases, public awareness didn’t help much to prevent injustices, and so did (not) media publications. Therefore, given the limited resources environmental, social and other activists usually have, it would be wiser to skip the virtual petitions and try to come up with more creative – and mainly more effective – methods to make a true change.

September 12th: The contribution of SPNI’s e-petition is unclear to me, since they did manage to recruit 300 people to join the formal objection they filed, along with at least 168 other objections signers – a truly impressive number anyway.