I’ve found that living in the 21st-century demands that the first thing you do every day before splashing your face with cold water and deciding whether to go with decaf or regular is check your email.
I’ve found that living in the 21st-century demands that the first thing you do every day before splashing your face with cold water and deciding whether to go with decaf or regular is check your email.
So every morning I find myself, bleary-eyed and still cursing the shrill ring of the alarm clock that continues to resound in my head, hitting the little envelope icon and watching as my inbox is overwhelmed by a torrent of new messages.
After having become accustomed to the persistent presence of spam in my life, I’ve learnt to reflexively delete anything with the words ‘enlarge’, ‘scheme’ or ‘pass-this-on-or…’ in it, sending
the annoyances to the big trash can in the sky without a second thought.
Lately, however, I find myself at odds with a new menace – emails promoting or encouraging a ‘cause’. Unlike your common or garden spam, cause emails aren’t as easy to discard.
The conscience might not mind passing up an opportunity to gain three more inches but it does take notice when it learns the story (complete with an iconic picture) of a Sudanese girl devastated by famine.
Clicking the delete button just doesn’t seem right. But don’t think it stops there. Attached is a request, often abstract, for aid or support of some sort.
It’s almost impossible to completely ignore and initially I found myself signing online petitions, joining Facebook protest groups or simply forwarding the message to everyone on my mailing list. After a while, however, the cause email loses its effect.
No matter how stirring the story or evocative the picture, the sheer number of cases presented started to make me fairly immune.
I still couldn’t hit delete but I could leave it to dwell in the recesses of my inbox silenced and unanswered.
Now before my confession raises eyebrowsand causes disapproving shakes of the head, I need to say that I’m all for the use of the internet in creating awareness and amplifying the needs of people who are oppressed and suffering across the globe.
I just don’t believe the cause email is the way to go. While the cause is in most cases necessary and noble, the irony is that such emails do a disservice to genuine activism.
The speed at which these emails are passed along reveals a vast duplication of work, leaving you confused as to how or where you should start making the world a better place.
More importantly, the mass of equally-urgent pleas seem to cancel one another out, leading to gross apathy and even disregard.
As a friend mentioned on the subject: “There are so many messages thrown around that none of them are meaningful anymore.”
Sharing information about the world around us through the medium of the web is undoubtedly valuable, but when it comes to actually contributing and supporting a cause, there needs to be more coherent and progressive forms of activism instead of a simple click-and-send approach.
Call me a cynic but it’s a bit difficult to change the world from your inbox, especially if you haven’t brushed your teeth yet.
