I'm Bob Artner from TechRepublic. Technology affectsgovernment in many ways that we're not aware of. And there's an interestingbattle going on right now between House members in Washington and organizationsthat are trying to organize on behalf of constituents. And it's all aroundsending and receiving email. So let's look at how constituents used to contacttheir members of Congress and what's happening now.
In the old days, you'd write a letter and you'd send it offto the House, and your Congressperson would have a legislative assistant whowould turn around and write a letter back. Pretty straightforward. Members ofCongress have what's called the franking privilege, which means they can sendletters to their constituents at no cost. It's a powerful way that theycontinue to get reelected time after time.
And this worked for decades and decades, and over time asmore and more mail would go into the House, legislative assistants would startto use word processing software to automatically generate replies. They wouldhave pen technology that would create signatures that look like they wereactually from the member of the House when in fact they were generated by amachine. But it was a physical piece of mail that was sent and a physical pieceof mail that was received.
What happened when email started in? Well, on the one hand,it became easier for a person to send an email to their Congressperson, right?Because those email addresses were freely published. And then what would happenis the legislative assistant, just like with regular mail, would send an emailresponse back on behalf of the Congressman.
And then what would happen is you'd get more and more emailthat started to come in, and the legislative assistants would respond by usingautomated templates in their email, email application, using word processing tostore all these and just customize a send on that. And so you'd see thisgreater volume going back. You can already see here that you're starting tolose some of that human interaction.
What's happening now is even bigger. You've got advocacyorganizations-nonprofits and other business lobbying-that are sending hugeamounts of mail to House members using automated websites, special softwarethat's designed for this purpose. And members of House, their legislativeassistants are responding to this huge barrage of email by using CRM softwareor other kinds of automated programs.
So what you had in the beginning was a constituent sending aletter, a personal letter to their member of Congress. Now what you have arelarge organizations, basically more or less kind of spamming the members of theHouse and then the House people responding with something that's equallyimpersonal.
How much mail are we talking about? Well, the WashingtonPost recently estimated that between 2002 and 2004, the volume of emailsreceived by just members of the House increased from about 50 million to justunder 100 million. They also estimate for the same time period, 2004, that theSenate received an additional 83 million pieces of email.
So here's the paradox. Technology's increased. It's mucheasier for us to contact our individual member of Congress. But has thistechnology really helped us have a more meaningful conversation? Or is itreally just an inauthentic, superficial conversation? Have we really lostsomething with this new technology?
