Waging a signature war

The takeaway Online petitions offer an opportunity for the public to wield its power.

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In his analysis of the "Flotilla Incident" - the name that has quickly calcified around Israel's recent lethal raid on activists' ships bearing aid to blockaded Palestinians in Gaza - George Packer of the New Yorker takes the sensible view that, no matter how the facts emerge, the pro-Palestinian activists have already succeeded in their primary aim: drawing negative public attention to Israel's blockade of Gaza. And public attention, many agree, is the all-important variable. "Sunday night's incident showed again that the most powerful force in international relations today is neither standing armies nor diplomatic councils, but public opinion as shaped by media," Packer wrote.

In one of the week's other major stories, the Boston Globe ran a series of photographs depicting sea birds smothered in a heavy brown sludge from the BP oil spill. Analysts expected the images to spark a long- delayed outbreak of public anger. It wasn't until the photos came out, wrote Michael Calderone, "that the spill's devastating effect on wildlife truly reverberated across media platforms, from Twitter to blogs, cable news to the daily paper." The photos inspired much talk of the power of images in the "digital age".

But in this digital, transnational era, how exactly does the public wield its power? Every now and then, in addition to my normal online diet of publications and blogs, I like to visit one of the internet's scrappier outposts, a website called PetitionOnline.com. Its home page - a quaint relic from the early days of web design - offers a snapshot of the 10 most active online petition campaigns on the web.

This week, in fairly typical fashion, a few of the site's top-ranked petitions mirrored the week's headlines in a way that was both maddening and clarifying - by reducing them to simple, duelling propositions. Of the top five petitions, three pertained to the Flotilla Incident. As many astute observers have pointed out, the two sides to the dispute are now engaged in a propaganda war over public perception of the incident. On PetitionOnline, however, they are engaged in something more brute and direct: a signature war. "Show your solidarity with Gaza Flotilla victims and Palestine" was the title of one petition that had, at press time, garnered 9,185 signatures. "Support Israel in the Gaza flotilla incident" - which demanded "an immediate public apology to Israel" - was running close behind with 7,834. The third - "Strip Israel of UN membership" - weighed in behind them at 4,286.

On the other hand, the other petitions that completed the top five departed wildly from the day's top news stories - but revealed perhaps even deeper veins of concern. One of them beseeched the American TV network ABC not to cancel a programme called FlashForward; the other implored Britain not to deport an Iranian lesbian named Kiana Firouz back to her home country. Those two petitions may seem like trifling campaigns next to the media-saturating flotilla story - but they have garnered a whopping 35,240 and 43,560 signatures, respectively.

Still, one wonders in all these cases: do such campaigns ever work? PetitionOnline - like so many of the internet's stateless domains - offers direct democracy in the absence of any social contract; grass roots with no soil. Perhaps as a consequence, and not surprisingly, most petitions fail. Nevertheless, disenfranchised people flock to the site. "People normally turn to a petition when the normal channels have been exhausted," says Kevin Matthews, the site's founder, "or when there are no channels." Millions of people visit the site every month, posting 30,000 signatures a day, rallying their assent. They are all trying to channel the vast public power whose effect is everywhere in evidence, but whose machinery is, for the most part, entirely invisible.

* John Gravois