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This article caught my attention because it is something that most people know about, yet use in the wrong way. The article discusses online petitions that can be made and I learned a lot from this article. According to this article, anyone could make an online petition for anything and if they got at least 25,000 signatures within a month, the White House had to respond to it whether, it was positive or not. However, since there have been very ridiculous and pointless requests, the signature requirement has gone up to 100,000 within a month.
The article goes into detail about a man who petitioned that the government build a “Death Star” from the Star Wars films, which did gain the 25,000 signatures it needed. But of course, there is no way the government should be spending taxpayer money on something that is completely pointless, so the White House politely declined this petition, saying that “the Administration does not support blowing up planets.”
Under the “We The People” initiative, anyone with internet access can petition anything they want and this initiative was first formed to promote an “openness” in the government. However, most people use it for ridiculous requests or jokes. What caught my attention was that these petition websites are something that people can be using for good causes; to help end something, to help out a cause that’s dear to them, or provide another view to a big issue in politics, but people aren’t taking advantage of it. Some people complain that the government doesn’t take their feelings into concern, but they can easily get the attention of the White House if they petition the right cause and get the necessary amount of signatures, which isn’t hard considering how large social networking is. It could really change something in congress if people used these petition websites for a good reason. The White House shouldn’t have to be wasting it’s time on issues that don’t make any sense at all.
WOW...The Web has really made anything possible in America. This blog made me think about a conversation between campaign managers Anita Dunn and Nicole Wallace. Anita Dunn was Obama's campaign manager during the 2008 Obama-McCain election. In her interview, she talks about how the Web 2.0 tools made it possible for her team to run “mini-campaigns” on Facebook. These min-campaigns let the users email their friends, write statuses, and kept them updated on what the next moves were for the Obama Team. Not only did this create a sense of pride in the work that the user did to elect Obama, but it united his supporters in a completely new way. The advancement in the Web 2.0 tools has really opened up so many ways to achieve any goal. From gathering petition signatures online to defeating Karl Rove’s genius antics, the Internet is definitely a strong tool.
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