Clarkson redux

The issue must also be timely. It needs to be a part of the news cycle for longer than a day or two before a petition is launched, so that the narrative already connects with people on an emotional level.

The petition must then be released into the public domain at a time when the people's attention to the subject is peaking. This level of timing is tricky and achieving it is often more a case of blind luck than deliberate strategy.

There's no use pretending that in the digital revolution human emotions count for less than they did in the age of analogue. In fact, the very opposite may well be true. Without emotion, there is no change. Think back to the tragedy of 9/11. It wasn't the work of terrorists per se that kept entire American airlines grounded for two or three months following the World Trade Centre attacks.

That was the result of human emotion. The future is shaped not primarily by technologies or events, but by how we choose to engage with technologies and events. Our choices are heavily influenced by feelings, whether we're conscious of them or not.

Finally, to have any chance of success, public protests through petitions and the like must be supported by a wide range of people. A petition can succeed with support from a very narrow demographic, but this mainly happens within the narrow world of product marketing, where goods are designed with niche markets in mind.

Outside of marketing-world, demographics count for less. Leaders of institutions such as governments and public bodies like the BBC are more likely to take note if backing comes from a broad cross-section of the community.

For all its good intentions, it seems the Clarkson petition, for all the media coverage it generated, didn't tick quite enough of these boxes. Yet in spite of its failure, people will continue to sign petitions for generations to come.

This is because online protests feed into two very human needs. They speak first of all to our need for social contact. The more we engage with high tech, the more we need high touch.

Despite the rapid growth of social media over the past few years, more than 62 million Americans say they are socially isolated and unhappy about it. In the UK, one third of the adult population lives alone and the average Brit claims to have just four 'real friends' but 150 Facebook friends.

For all our digital connectedness, we seem in some ways to be as isolated as ever .

In her book The Village Effect, psychologist Susan Pinker shows how human lifespan can be extended when people live in close-knit, village-like communities of familiar people. Studies have proven that quality social connections can keep people alive.

Rapid urbanisation and cheap travel, which lead to high mobility and transient populations, are prone to drain our pool of proximate friends. In the face of this, online petitions seem to offer opportunities to cluster, around a cause.