Petition to Save the World

Petition to save the world

So, there appears to be a 'new' phenomenon in social networking sites these days, which appears to be a logical continuation of the 'email petitions' that used to be common a while back.

Generally they take the following form:

"[Request that people put this up for an hour]
[Messsage Goes Here - generally its either about raising awareness or putting it up in some groups' honour]
[NumberOfPerson% won't repost this statement, emotional blackmail to repost goes here]"

Example:

"Put this as your status if you know someone who has Mad Llama Disease. I wish that people would cure this horrible disease. People who have Mad Llama Disease look for LOVE & ATTENTION. 92.135% won't copy and paste this. Will you make it your status for at least one hour?"

Now I've seen a ton of these, for reasons including cancer, homosexuality and some law in Uganda about killing gay people, asperger's syndrome...

Now, for the most cases these things are useless. For certain cases, they are actually worse than doing nothing at all.

So lets start with 'useless' ones. The world doesn't function through democracy or through wishful thinking. If 1000 people sign a petition for there to be democracy in Libya, there won't be democracy in libya.

Petitions and stuff like that work when:

a. Someone is actually giving the results to the right person
b. The right person actually listens to the results (for example is a politician in a DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY)
c. The change is easy to do and the only reason it wasn't done was because there was a perceived lack of interest in it

Most importantly, pharmacutical companies don't work through democracy either. They work through the movement of profits. So a petition to cure mad llama syndrome - if its not going to be profitable, is going to be useless.

Now lets talk about "Raising Awareness". This is a common excuse. "Yes I put this message up in order to raise awareness about mad llama syndrome".
Awareness is such a funny word isn't it? Lets see what it means: "The state or quality of being aware of something". So I would assume "Raising awareness" means "Making people who weren't aware, now aware".

So, what a nice idea. So you'd expect that 'awareness' will teach information that most people don't know. Now I don't think within a 250/100 character limit you can teach too many people, but I digress. So, did you know being homosexual is neither a choice nor an illness? I sure didn't know this very obvious fact until I saw it in one of these posts.

So when does Awareness work? When you have simple information, which most people don't know, and which could be important - "Did you know that after the age of 102, you should test yourself for Mad Llama Disease by performing this method? It could save your life"

Allright, so now we see how most of those are useless. Now in certain cases (as explained earlier), they do more harm than good. Lets explain why:

People like feeling happy. Sometimes certain things cause feelings of guilt - such as the emotional blackmail which comes with each and every message. Now, signing/spreading this sort of thing, gives a cheerful feeling that you're actually doing something helpful. In reality (as above) you're doing nothing. Now, this feeling of having done something could very well stop you from doing something which could actually help.

Case study - Yesterday I helped Mad Llama Disease Sufferers by 'raising awareness'. I don't feel compelled to help in another way such as by sending money to research facilities, which could actually help someone. When the emotional blackmail appears to push you to spread the message around, you will obey that. You won't be doing anything useful.

So use your head instead of your emotional centers of your brain.

Llama.