Social media and sustainability

Several MASS members attended the Sustainable Urbanisation conference in Melbourne last week. Social media was identified as a potentially important contributor to the transition to a sustainability society for a number of reasons such as allowing direct public communication globally and outside traditional power structures, and empowering youth and facilitating engagement with them.

Greenpeace has just announced a campaign to get Facebook to unfriend coal by increasing its own use of clean energy and also by advocating for the use of clean energy. This provides a really interesting and important test of the role of social media in driving corporate behaviour change, and perhaps also a challenge for Facebook itself which is now firmly embedded in global corporate power structures. If successful, this may also help drive the growing "new" economy (including information technology) towards the use of clean energy independently of the behaviour of the "old" economy.

Further information on the Guardian's Sustainable Business Blog.    

We will provide some more information on the highlights and outcomes of the conference in later posts.