Possible New Protest Method

Friday March 21, 2003 02:04

by Analyst

Might be an interesting vehicle of expression - don't know if it has been tried before, but I've never heard of it so maybe it's worth a try....

Don't know if this has been tried before, but it occurred to me some individuals in companies, or even public e-mail addresses like customerservice@company.com or function@government.gov might like to get some pictures from protests.

If the pictures were a nice juicy size, and there were a lot of people sending them, there would be a lot of traffic into some e-mail servers.

Of course bandwidth and server costs might increase, and their system availability (uptime) might suffer a bit and administration costs of filtering them would certainly increase, but I'm sure the benefit of seeing lots and lots of people exercising their rights would make up for it and they would get a warm glowing feeling inside....

You would really need to write them a variable personal message with the note, and the pictures would need to be different file sizes, formats or possibly included in other documents. After all - the recipient would get bored if every message was the same and they might get mistaken by the filtering/firewall as irrelevant.

For it to work really well you would need to circulate the e-mail addresses at the protest, so they would all tend to arrive at once afterwards. Otherwise the impact wouldn't be as great.

Best to send them from a handy internet cafe and use a free e-mail service (smaller the better). Avoid static IP addresses. Big crowd shots would be best, avoid pictures of individuals or specific groups.

Pass this idea onto anyone who you might like it! Post comments if you have any refinements or if you know it has been done already or is problematic in some way.