MeL’s Point: Going Green

By MeL on Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - 20:03

If you haven’t logged into Twitter for the last couple of days, once you do, you might be tempted to check whether your monitor is working properly. But don’t worry, all the green avatars that you will see have nothing to do with a malfunction of your monitor.

Since last weekend, the term “going green” took on a whole new meaning, one that isn’t related to Al Gore and climate change. Changing the colour of your Twitter avatar to green means that you support the thousands of people who take to the streets of Iranian cities daily to protest the outcome of last week’s presidential elections, which they claim was rigged. Most protesters wear something green, like signs and shirts that ask “Where is my vote?”, and green has become the colour of the protest movement in Iran and their supporters around the globe.

Protest in Hamburg, Germany (Picture: Welt Online)

When more and more of my Twitter friends started to change their avatars, I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I was outraged by how the Iranian government is dealing with the protests: banning them, threatening protesters with imprisonment and even violence, shutting down communication systems, and banning journalists from reporting about the protests. On the other hand, I didn’t want to fall into the trap of only judging from my western, European perspective and wanted to make sure that I didn’t support something or someone I wouldn’t usually support.