At the present stage of its development, human civilization faces many new problems, one of which is climate change. As it is summarized in the book Choices for America in a Turbulent World: Strategic Rethink “ Today, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are 40 percent higher than at the start of the industrial revolution” (69). And although there is still no unambiguous view on this problem, there are many scenarios for the further development of the Earth’s biosphere and civilization. The forecasts of the Scientists cover different periods of the future, different development options are considered, but the climate as a system of conditions that ensures the diversity of life on Earth is given much attention. Knowledge of the processes of climate change, an understanding of the causes, and the consequences of the impact of human activity on climate are necessary for modern society for activities in the field of environmental management, energy consumption, behavior in everyday life and in production. In the modern educational process, the issues of climate change are affected practically only in geography courses and, in the study of natural disasters which is clearly not enough. However, with the technological expansion societies all over the world are able to be informed and kept aware of what is happening with our planet. The following paper will introduce three examples of the ways that online novelties cooperate in defeating drastic changes in our planet’s climate by spreading the importance of the above-mentioned issue and fostering public participation.
Protests against the results of elections in Iran and Moldova in 2009, anti-government demonstrations in Egypt and Tunisia in 2010, and demonstrations in Libya, Yemen, and Morocco in 2011 — during all these events social media, primarily Facebook and Twitter, became the tool for coordinating activists. It is not surprising that journalists, experts, and scientists started talking about the emergence of a new phenomenon – the Twitter revolution. The author of the term Twitter-Revolution was Yevgeny Morozov, an American researcher of Belarusian origin (Morozov). He applied this expression to the mass protests of Moldovan youth against the election results in the parliament in 2009. It all started with peaceful actions – youth non-profit organizations used social networks and organized a flash mob, the participants of which were supposed to come to the main square of Chisinau with burning candles. However, about 10 thousand people gathered on the square, demanding the cancellation of the election results and picketing the building of the Moldovan parliament (Mungiu-Pippidi and Munteanu 138). Twitter served not only as a tool for mobilization, Morozov notes, it also became the main tool for disseminating news about the protest. Every minute hundred of people reported what was happening on the square, they published photos and videos from the scene. Foreign journalists actively used this information. Hence, the term created by Morozov quickly got accustomed among the researchers of media technologies and journalists (Morozov). It is inevitably clear that the Twitter revolution is a powerful social tool. Having this in mind, authors Alexandra Segerberg and W. Lance Bennett researched the relevance between the twitter revolution and climate change. In the article on Social Media and the Organization of Collective Action Alexandra Segerberg and W. Lance Bennett suggest a different approach to this phenomenon. Authors argue that “that evaluating the relation between transforming communication technologies and collective action demands to recognize how such technologies infuse specific protest ecologies” ( 1). The latter also includes their perception to the deeper traces of the social media in relation to broader cultural contexts such as climate change. In order to find these traces, Segerberg and Bennett use the two hashtags that referred to the 2009 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen. To elaborate, Analyzing hashtag streams associated with the two respective protests from the perspective of our three points indicates interestingly different yet similar dynamics in each ecology, as well as suggesting differing roles for Twitter within them. Examining the essence of hashtag they explain that “the community-generated hashtag convention allows anyone to use a hashtag for any tweeted message whatsoever” (1). In that case, a Twitter stream can be conceived as a cross-cutting transmission belt connecting diverse users, uses and different temporal and spatial regions of the protest space. The latter serves as the beneficial tool spreading the climate change awareness and calling for a protest against it.
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