Is online reaching boiling point?

Claims made by Alex Wissner-Gross in The Sunday Times article, “Google and you’ll damage the planet” have created considerable debate. My personal favourite being the question posed by the green thing blog: “could people in England live longest without cups of tea or Google searches?”

My average day includes both kettle boiling and online searching – at work and home – so these articles hit me hard. I won’t be giving up my cups of tea any time soon and I don’t see trips to the library to do research fitting into my working day. But I do care about the future of our planet. So what’s the answer?

Those of us who are passionate about new technology will jump in quickly to try it out, learning as we go. And in the process we will adopt the best way of utilising that technology that we can.

The launch of Twitter - a free resource to communicate with a vast number of people (friends, celebrities, experts in an immeasurable number of fields, etc.) was therefore bound to cause a splash.

Increasingly, the tool has been adopted by people updating their ‘followers’ on their every action. This can only be using up resources that could be better spent. Not everyone is interested in our kettle boiling status.

The true value of Twitter as I see it is as an amazing information sharing tool – where else can we tap into the thoughts and knowledge of industry leaders such as Robert Scoble?

Being more targeted in our communications and thoughtful about the way we use technology, we can all do our bit towards a sustainable planet. Being passionate about new things is to be encouraged, but acknowledging the implications is important.

Twitter allows instant short messaging – let’s keep to the point and share valuable tips. Who knows – the future to sustainable living could be a tweet away!