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goals. Now it would be easier to bypass or pressure elected leaders to do what the people
wanted, and it would also facilitate the search to form new groups for political
mobilization. E-mail, then, as part of these new informative technologies, could thus
redefine political space and geography, vastly changing the republic that the Framers
designed and anticipated.
Adjusting to the E-mail Revolution
Since the early days of 175-300 messages per Congressional member per week,
the volume of e-mail has exponentially increased. In 1998, Congress received 20 million
e-mail messages, in 2000, the House received 48,000,000 e-mails (Goldschmidt 2001),
with Congress receiving a total of 80,000,000 e-mail messages in 2000. In 2001 the
House received about 1 million e-mails per day (Vasishtha 2001), while in 2002, one
estimate was that the Senate received 88,000 messages per day (Miller 2002). After 9/11
and the anthrax scare when mail delivery to Congress was slowed or interrupted, e-mails
also spiked (Vasishtha 2001). Put into perspective, from an average of 175-300 e-mail
per week per Congress person in 1996 to 1997, it jumped to about 719 per Congress
person per week in 1998, and to 2,875 in 2002. In the Senate in 2002, this meant over
6,000 e-mails per day alone!
How do members of Congress deal with this flood of e-mail? Not well according
to one study. In a 2001 report entitled “E-mail Overload in Congress: Managing a
Communication Crisis,” the Congress Online Project noted that the avalanche of e-mail
was taxing resources and increasing workloads, as well as threatening the Congressional
computer network with an overload. Members of Congress reported that the early way to
Convention