THE BRITNEY OPTION.(Mass Immediate Response, People for the American Way)

In May, the Senate's eleventh-hour compromise on filibusters led to a lot of talk about a return to civility. The President's nomination, last week, of John G. Roberts to fill the upcoming vacancy on the Supreme Court may change that. Advocacy groups on both sides of the political fence are again cranking up their phone-bank operations and e-mail campaigns, as they get ready for a showdown. One organization, People for the American Way, is trying something new: an initiative to coordinate thousands of simultaneous calls to the Senate by alerting its members via cell-phone text messaging, a medium more generally associated with preteen flirting or casting votes for "American Idol" than with progressive activism. The group is calling the operation Mass Immediate Response, or mir, though at least one political observer has dubbed it the Britney Option.

mir is the creation of Jed Alpert, a wireless-entertainment entrepreneur, who originally developed the application, in 2001, for a cross-promotional marketing campaign by the electronics company Samsung and the pop star Britney Spears. At a cost of $19.95 for three months, tens of thousands of the singer's fans (many of them, it turned out, men no longer in their teens) signed up to receive several text messages a week, supposedly from Britney. By selecting a link embedded in each message, subscribers would be led to a recorded message, either from Spears herself ("Hey, it's Britney Spears. Can I just tell you, I had a blast at your party-- seriously, your friends are really cool. Next time I have a party, you're totally invited") or from one of the members of her entourage, among them her personal assistant, Alicia, and her bodyguard, Big Rob.

The novel aspect of the technology is its ability to deliver customized messages to registered cell-phone users, based on such criteria as the user's address, date of birth, and, in some cases, musical tastes. For participants in the Britney Spears promotion, this meant getting to hear Spears read their horoscopes every month. The horoscopes, Alpert explained the other day, were drawn up by "experienced, highly respected astrologers, based in Chicago--and half of that statement is true." They were also short and simple, and they often included an injunction to go for it. Spears recorded only twelve different horoscopes, but, Alpert said, "a complex algorithm" allowed them to be ...