The constant forward - (humorous one about how internet traffic from elections has lost its frenzy!)

JEWISH WORLD REVIEW.COM ^ | JUNE 7, 2005 | ANDREI CODRESCU

[CHARLITE]

Has anyone noticed the degradation of political activism as reflected in the quality of e-mail forwards?

During the election, when this country was in the grip of political passion, the internet hummed with outraged forwards explicating and excoriating the current snakepits and malevolence of public policy. Every citizen in possession of a computer (and that's every citizen! Some citizens have several, one in every color for every mood!) forwarded madly his or her opinions. These forwards, judging by volume and pitch, were not just opinions: they were expressions of the forwarder's innermost soul, as radical in their way as the anti-war demonstrations of the Sixties.

E-mails, for instance, calling on a mass-uprising of poets against the war in Iraq by means of writing an anti-war poem that was then guaranteed to be forwarded to at least a million people who were of the same opinion and were simultaneously engaged in writing their own anti-war poems, nearly choked my internet traffic because I just couldn't keep deleting them fast enough to get on with my business.

When John Kerry (remember him?) showed up on TV at a podium with his website splashed over it, the forwards from his site went ballistic, as did those from the people supporting him in other ways, through movie forwards, slogan forwards, and cartoon forwards.

During the political season I kept looking back with nostalgia at the days when the only e-mail forwards were jokes.

Idylic age! Bygone days!

[TBP]

Bump.