Three colleagues are promoting greener living through Twitter. YONG HUEY JIUN writes.
GREEN is the new black. On Twitter anyway.
The man who made saving trees in vogue, former United States vice president Al Gore, has taken his environmental crusade to one of the fastest-growing online social networks.
Just three years ago, the Nobel prize and Oscar winner hammered home the message of a planet in jeopardy in An Inconvenient Truth, a compelling film documentary about global warming.
Thirty-year-old Jek Tan recalls how in one simple yet powerful diagram, Gore explained carbon dioxide´s impact on the earth´s temperature and projected its effects in 50 years to come. To this day, the presentation has stuck indelibly in his mind, forever changing the way he viewed planet earth.
“The readings were off the charts!” Tan remarked. “It scared me to think what Earth would be like for my children.” That alarming revelation has yielded “#GIY”, short for “Green-It-Yourself”, an online collection of green tips named for Twitter´s popular communication format.
In March this year, Tan, along with two of his colleagues, Tee Tsun Joo and Alex Lam, came together to promote greener living through the online social network. From turning off the tap when brushing your teeth to hibernating your PC when you are out for lunch, the (#GIY) hub offers practical green tips and ideas that are easy to apply both at home and at work.
“Anyone can be part of this. It´s about what you can do and how you can do it,” said Tee, 28, who first envisioned Twitter as a tool for advocating green.
The trio decided to translate their tweets (messages) into action at the place they spend the most time together: at work. Making sure their company´s corporate culture dovetails with their green mission, they started bringing their own food containers to work. Soon, other employees began to follow.
“The numbers for using food (plastic) containers don´t look very impressive on a day-to-day basis. But if you take an average of eight containers a day and multiply that by five working days and one year -- and we´ve been doing this for the last three to four years -- we´ve actually saved thousands of containers,” Tan explained.
But why Twitter? With tweets limited to 140 characters, Tee said Twitter is fast, easy and concise.
A voting mechanism on Twitter unearths the more popular green tips that may sometimes get buried in a seemingly bottomless stream of information. “If you make the effort to dig through websites of power companies, you´ll find many green handy tips. But the problem is they are buried so deep within the site no one really reads them,” Tan pointed out.
However, Twitter´s most productive use has been its potential in tapping into the world´s collective brain. Twitterers can re-tweet (RT) -- pass along what someone else said on Twitter -- to their followers.
“We don´t always have to come up with new green ideas,” said Lam, 30, known on Twitter as @TheBackpackr.
As Tee discovered, no idea is too bizarre on Twitterland. In May, Google, the world´s largest search engine, announced in its blog an unorthodox low-carbon approach to property maintenance -- the company is turning to a herd of 200 goats to replace its lawn mowers.
Though still an early-adopter phenomenon in Malaysia, Twitter´s traffic growth is accelerating. Traffic on #GIY soared on World Earth Day (April 22), double the number of tweets on a normal day. Already, the trio has drawn a large following, with a network spanning 10,000 twitterers since they began.
Twitter, as it turns out, has become an unlikely intersection of digital concepts and social activism. But it wasn´t always this way. When Twittermania first hit the World Wide Web, Internet hipsters randomly tapped out a slew of mundane status updates and comments to pass their time.
If Twitter´s power is properly harnessed, the stream of mindless Internet chatter on #GIY may one day offer an early glimpse into public sentiment -- if not already -- and perhaps even help shape it.
“The power is exponential in the realm of online social network,” Tan marvelled.
For now, though, the trio is content on making an earthly difference in the digital world -- one tweet at a time.
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