BUILD A BETTER IN-BOX

Philadelphia Inquirer: 'Fess up, anyone who's ever hit the delete key without reading an e-mail message. The inbox was overflowing ... your boss needed that project yesterday ... and half the messages came from a not-that-funny joke list, anyway.
But what if you hit the delete key 40 million times in one year?
If your job happened to be the people's representative in Congress, well, it might look as if you didn't much care what the folks back home had to say.
Members of Congress apparently ignored half the 80 million messages sent their way last year. So says a recent study by a congressional think-tank.
Swelling flood: But don't get the idea that the nonpartisan Congressional Management Foundation has produced an expos & eacute;. The facts are that Congress simply hasn't been able to cope with a sudden, swelling flood of e-mail. In that it is like many a company or other institution -- for example, a newspaper editorial board -- that deals with the public.
The e-mail that's ignored doesn't come only from Mom and Pop constituents tapping out messages to their representatives. Special-interest groups and paid lobbyists are crowding in-boxes with made-to-order groundswells. It's called "Astroturf," i.e. phony grass roots.
The volume is astounding. The House went from 2 million messages in 1998 to 50 million in 2000, while the Senate saw a 15-fold increase. Congressional staffs that haven't grown in proportion -- the mood is for tax cutting, after all -- aren't keeping up.
The irony is that a medium so fast and efficient becomes a dead end when the pipeline gets clogged. With overuse, participatory democracy on the Internet turns into background noise.
One worry is that e-mails to Congress that go unanswered will add to many Americans' cynicism: Suspicions confirmed. They only listen to fat cats with checkbooks. But this might be one of those times when the innocent explanation is the correct one. When a technology grows like kudzu, it's just hard to keep up and it takes time to adjust.
No doubt, there are some bureaucrats whose first impulse is to use the e-mail glut as an excuse to ignore citizen input. But many in Congress say they try hard to harvest valid constituent concerns from the PC inbox. Congress may need to spare a few bucks for some technological aids. E-mail isn't going away; elected officials have to figure out how to rescue this vital new channel of input from the plague of overuse.
And citizens must tailor expectations to reality. Don't read too much into a form reply or non-reply. Recognize that your mass e-mail list with the names of all 535 members of Congress muffles your message, rather than amplifying it. And remember your own e-mail habits: To send is fine, but to delete ... ah, that's all-too-human.