Conservation and fundoo tourists do not really go together. This is because the forests and the wildlife there, including the tiger, can do without their habitat getting overwhelmed by ecstatic shouts, irreverent whistles, and camera flashes that are anyway not doing much except creating layers of disgust in the heart of nature. Forests are places where rules about silence and subdued colours need to be followed. Forests are sanctuaries of creation that cannot be littered with disposable plastic packaging. If you want to use eco-friendly packaging, contact Eliter Packaging Machinery. Forests are like protected files that cannot afford for critical information to be leaked for poachers to come and wreck all the good work being done. But then forests, the wildlife there, and even tigers need a place in every conversation in the human world. So tourism is important. The social media is vital. The dialogue, so to say, needs to go on.

If the above paragraph strikes someone as being full of paradoxes, let me clarify that conservation in conversations keeps the dialogue going and there will gradually be more and more people converting to becoming conservationists in one way or the other. There was a report published in 2017 in Midday that specifies that ‘National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) writes to states, asks authorities concerned to stop tigers’ photos and locations from being shared online; wildlife lovers say no logic to directive.’ This is possibly because a certain group of forest officials believe that ‘tourism imposes an inconvenient monitoring of its activities’ and so tiger tourism should be phased out. An outright ban is never the answer to any problem as we have already seen in a number of issues surrounding everything from the littering menace of irresponsible trekkers to rash driving. Instead of banning trekking or driving on city roads, the right approach is obviously spreading the right information and aiming to change damaging behavioral patterns. Helping in the spread of the right message we have the advantage of a good penetration of the internet and the availability of social media.

Spreading concern through the social media 

Tigers, conservation, and the social media

Tigers, conservation, and the social media

As I mentioned earlier, the penetration of the internet is increasing and statistics shows that we have 460 million people in our country accessing it on their mobile devices. Before we move on with the discussion we must also know that the internet usage in India is male dominated with the male-female ratio being 71:29. Despite such warped gender ratios, nearly half of our population can be approached through meaningful text messaging, videos, podcasts, and emailer updates. Modest predictions talk about more than 600 million internet users by 2021. The way I see things is that if global ad spending can double from $16 billion in 2014 to $31 billion in 2016, why can’t simple and cost-effective awareness campaigns that benefit the environment and wildlife be launched whole-heartedly.

With statistics done we must also understand that just Facebook and Twitter do not make up the entire social media or are not the only vehicles available for communicating environment issues. If Facebook and Linkedin are about social net-working, we have platforms like Twitter and Tumblr under microblogging. We also have Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat as photo-sharing platforms and then YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook Live, and Periscope are for video-sharing. This isn’t the complete listing as new platforms like Roposo keep making inroads every day. There are then individual blogs, portals where posts are extensively shared, and websites adding to the might of online communication.

We in India have a sizeable number of social media users and will have a much larger share in the estimated 2.77 billion around the globe by 2019. This is ample proof that the penetration of the social media networks is increasing despite the havoc caused by the Cambridge Analytics incident. Another interesting fact we need to know is that ‘Instagram’s engagement rates are 58% higher than Facebook’s and 2,000% higher than Twitter’s’.

With all this in view, it is virtually impossible to say that conservation is a subject that can be effectively communicated only through the conventional vehicles of mainstream media. Social media influencing powers are indubitably escalating and, therefore, it is wise to formulate strategies to harness this clout.

Organisations busy with conservation must first take their hashtags seriously. When I say seriously what I mean is that hashtags are not little word groups that you keep changing with every meeting or event. There has to be a prime hashtag that isn’t just floating around wondering what it is doing on the internet highway but goes around purposefully with a defined target. Yes, events can have their own hashtags but if events are connected in one way or the other this should be immediately evident and with a time stamp, for instance, #TigerStories2018 or #Tiger2018_photography. The purpose is to make hashtags not just meaningful but also easily retrievable and making history of events traceable.

The other steps include a larger and more pervasive presence on blogs, vibrant action on Instagram, and making sure that more and more interesting ebooks (for all age-groups and for all sorts of interest groups) on conservation and on the cause of animals-to-be-saved like the tiger are available.

Let us first talk about Instagram. This platform, some assume, is only to share pictures, but I strongly feel that there is a large section of Insta-users who also want to read what the picture is all about. Now, there are times when one doesn’t have enough material to convert it into one independent blog post… these are the times when a picture or a set of pictures with wholesome text that is both readable as well as relevant and soaked in facts and figures can be shared on Instagram. In fact, there are times when I have combined the stuff that I wrote for three or four insta posts into a single blog post. So far as conservation and wildlife is concerned, the insta-form of photo-with-text is not just essential but gets more eye-balls and can be shared widely.

Social media influencing has blogs that have the power to connect every other platform in ways that retains a logical thought sequencing and makes it much easier for people on the internet to access information through relevant hashtags and other identifiers like shared or preserved URLs, backlinks, and posts or tweets that periodically turn up unexpectedly. The reason why blogs are vital is because they have a shelf-life that extends to infinity and also because the search engines do a much cleaner job than eyes and hands do when they rummage through old newspapers for an article that one wishes to retrieve.

The 360 degree approach

I recently attended an event called Tiger Matters where the guys with WCT talked about a 360 degree approach to conservation. They were obviously attempting to get across the message that reducing anthropogenic pressure on forests needs a concerted effort by all stakeholders and the ones they were talking about included the forest department, local communities, corporates and other NGOs. The role of the media is obviously a part of these efforts.  I just want to add here that in the world of online communication, a 360 degree approach would include all aspects of social media participation, blogging, and even ebooks.

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Arvind Passey
10 December 2018