Quote:
Originally Posted by TWeb
I wrote to him a couple months ago when Preservation Chicago first highlighted the urgent endangered status of both buildings. The day of his Sun-Times letter publication I finally received an email response that was the stereotypical "thanks for contacting me, I value your opinion". I must be naive because I was geniunely surprised to see that he was not just indifferent to this but full on fighting on behalf of the GSA for their unjustifiable destruction.
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I think writing to lawmakers is valuable (especially physical letters), but only if it reaches the critical level where it appears to represent a non-insignificant portion of someone's constituency. I think a good amount of people have to contact whoever about the same thing, whereby you have a collective action problem. All those online petition sites tried to get around that problem with using an internet platform -- you get an increase in the visibility of a particular issue among like-minded people, so it seems to solve the problem in that way. However, the energy required to participate is too low, so they proliferate too much, tanking the value of the individual petitions and creating a perception that the medium is inconsequential. I'm sure the energy equals out either way; too few people expending a good amount to write in or too many people expending little to click a button.