Over the last few years, well no, over the last decade, I have abused the innovations of email and SMS for the purpose of political canvassing. In fact I have become so accustomed to writing emails to people about “subject X” while weaving into the document a series of inductive loops that coerce certain readers to support certain causes, most of which have nothing to do with “subject X”, where “subject X” refers to the matter being overtly discussed; that I have even done this in my sleep.

For the most part this has been achieved simply through my use of the subject line, given that I expect my communications to be deleted without being read. At the same time, however, the social drama caused by my email and SMS communications usually is enough to ensure that these communications are circulated and read widely.

I have been taken aback at the extent to which my mad writings have influenced the world around me, usually by inspiring politico bigwigs to assert that they could do what I propose without my assistance or participation and more recently by inspiring community leaders to be as paranoid as they can be without Delta9-THC.

Indeed the number of times that I wrote something in week 1, only to hear TM saying the same thing in week 2 or 3, was astounding. But I fear that what was more astounding was the manner in which my message was misunderstood such that the idea was then implemented badly.

However, I must say that I don’t claim to have all of the answers, just most of them, and I don’t claim to understand all of the demands from all of the constituencies, just the root cause of all of them and the process of satisfying all of them. I also don’t claim to be the most agreeable person, in fact I would say that I am fairly misanthropic insofar as I find the average person to be a useful subject for indoctrination, but not much more.

So perhaps I am my own worst enemy, in respect of my failure to have recruited a single person in the last 7 years. Indeed it is a tall order to recruit people to provide voluntary service in aid of what seems to be a losing cause, when the competition offers salaries, no work and access to power, but surely I should have been able to recruit just one person?

Perhaps my emails from the edge (of sanity, perhaps) are the cause of this political solitude, after all who wants to be involved with a person and an organisation which does nothing except covert political canvassing and corruption busting? But then again, let’s ask the people (and the Indian and Tamil people specifically) of Durban, what their conversations would have been about had they not had multiple ongoing corruption palavers as cud to chew between 2004 and 2009?

Is there any Indian or Tamil community leader who has not heard of the corruption-busting activities of the Thiru Valluvar Centre? Is there any Indian or Tamil community leader who has wondered why the Tirukkural is being used to bust corruption? Is there any Indian or Tamil community leader who thinks that the Tirukkural should be used for some other purpose, like laundering donations perhaps? No, I didn’t think so.

But nonetheless the object of mass communication is to influence people to think in specific manners and ways, and we see that the media has no qualms about this. So what’s the big problem if I choose to use email, SMS or for that matter blogs to punt an agenda? And to cause people to do what I want? As an example, my editor has received 7 emails from me this last weekend, all for the purpose of contextualising the content of this blog post, so as to cajole her to publish this post.

Now this blog may be published or it may be shelved, but one thing remains the same … whether you read this blog or not, you are still not going to vote for the Minority Front, are you? No, I didn’t think so.

Happy New Year, may 2010 be a fabulous year for everyone.

• The perils of drunk SMSing

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 3:39 am and is filed under Perspective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.