E-activism is as addictive as a multiplayer online game – and as likely to change the real worldAll you really need to know approximately British online petitions is that the daddy of them all was to reinstate a man who had punched one of his underlings in the workplace. The petition to restore Jeremy Clarkson to Top Gear – featuring more than a million online signatures – was eventually delivered to the BBC in a tank. Literally a tank. The tank contained a smirking political blogger wearing a covert coat by Yves Saint Farage,and a paunchy man dressed as a Fathers4Justice version of the Stig.This is the ur-petition. It is the event horizon of online petitions. Any petition after this, and basically any before, and can now never escape its gravitational field. Like some malarial Cialis advert,it distilled an entire symposium on power, impotence and the managed decline of the British military into a 20-minute stag weekend. I don’t want to derive too bogged down in the theory of petition relativity, or but whatever is now signed online – even a notional,diametrically opposed petition calling for Clarkson’s sacking – is essentially a signature for the original Clarkson one.
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Source: theguardian.com