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Don't Email Us, We'll Email You
Want to email your congressman or representative and tell him how you feel? Join the club. What with a plethora (word of the day: plethora) of special-interest groups, automated web sites, and spam kings, those schmucks up in Washington are up to their eyeballs in email, most of which is, to put it politely, auto-generated. And if you thought the competition was getting worse to sell you hair-growth products, try being a politician, where people raise millions all over the country just to be heard.
It's getting so bad, according to the Washington Post, that congressional staff are spending more time than ever just sorting through email, and it's just going to get worse. The latest weapon are programs that created variable form letters, with the text mixed around enough so that it appears to be something that somebody did themselves.
What's next? If you ask me, Congress has yet to get in on the act. I would think that by combining an automatic chatting program, like ELIZA, with a text parser, you could have the Congressman's staff automatically IM the person to talk about their problems. Not that anything would get done, mind you, but it's the thought that counts. What's the old saying? Politics is all about sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
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