KATHMANDU — These last few days the World Wide Web has been the victim of a new storm. Hopefully, this one brings a wind of change.
In this modern world, it is not unusual to discover one morning that pouring a bucket of ice on your head, throwing cheese on a baby’s face or eating toxic washing powder, is now a “cool” thing to do. In here lies the magic of the internet culture: it is unpredictable. A borderless no man’s land of free speech where a few eccentric anonymous minds decide some rainy or sunny day, somewhere, to do something out of the box. Sure, it can be very dark or shockingly offensive, but it can also be genuinely nice or genius and positively innovative. Sometimes, it has a few “likes”, “thumbs ups”, “retweets” before disappearing in the unknown void of data where billions of terabits drift. Therefore, from time to time, in a few monthly occasions, the network reminds us it has capricious tides and hits our feeds with a badly taken picture, a misspelled message, that goes all around our planet and changes our daily routines.
Today, I give you a new proof that trends can be as mysterious as the humans behind them: The Trashtag.
For those of you living in a cave these last 10 years and who just discovered the internet jungle, a tag or hashtag is this symbol #. It is often used on social media as a short cut to spread a specific message or categories of your thoughts and content.
The #trashtag is a new green initiative supported by no official organizations only the motivated connected and environmentally sensible social network .
It’s a viral photo challenge with no particular reword than a well-deserved self-pride. And the rules are very simple: You find a dirty polluted area, take a picture of it posing with your friends, clean it up, and take a second one proudly standing next to the bin bags or spotless landscape. Then comes the most important part of a viral trend, you must “share it”. Put on any social media accounts, add the #trashtag and let it travel around the world to inspire others.
It was actually created for the first time in 2015 by a company as an initiative to preserve and save endangered national parks and beaches but didn’t make much noise. It had to wait for Byron Roman, an internet user, to publish his exploit 4 years later and dig out the old hashtag to give it a nice shine and finally make it a trend.
It is hard to stay objective when describing such initiatives. I must admit, it is a beautiful countermeasure to the environmental crisis our planet is going through and a positive usage of the internet that recently has been showing us more disadvantages than the promises it ounce brought by its birth and evolution.
The math is quite simple: On Facebook, there are over 2.32 billion monthly active , 1 billion on Instagram, 321 million on Twitter. If even 10 % of them took part in the challenge it could clean up entire countries.
For example, in France, there are 80,000 tones of garbage abandoned each year and 32 million Facebook . If ten percent of them joined the challenge and picked up at least 25 kilos (3 or 4 bin bags) the problem would be solved.
But a dirty challenge also applies to dirty countries. The trend is starting to kick off in India and Nepal (cover picture). Countries that desperately needs massive clean up and awareness on the crisis they are, like any other inhabitant of the blue planet, responsible for.
If every cry for help made by the scientific community and NGO’s about the time ticking bomb over our heads have been ignored until now, maybe social network will have more impact on the younger generation and give planet earth the second chance she deserves. Because our poor home is slowly fading away as most stand passive in front of its decay.
