Okay. Today on Earth day, I have finally seen Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth". They screened it on cable television and I must say it is every bit as engaging and inspiring. The credits in the end of the movie showed a number of interesting messages including a call for action. I liked the movie for it's close personal touch and found myself in agreement with the protagonist of the movie, Al Gore a lot. Truth be told, people listen to you if you happen to have been the vice president of the United States of America. Having said this, I must also say that Al Gore has done a tremendously important service with his position to create a new wave of consciousness on this very serious environmental issue.

After watching the movie, I came online to see how important these issues were on the internet. Now that I was enlightened with specific keywords, my searches became more refined. However, as every seasoned internet surfer knows, it is often common to wander into a rogue wave. I also deviated slightly onto rogue or rather exotic waves and was surprised that there were more important things on the internet than the planetary crisis !These I soon found were my all time favourite female Diva, Madonna ! and close on her heels was Lindsay Lohan. I found that there were more hits on Google for the pop diva than there were for the climate crisis. I bring to you the story in pictures :

The above three pictures are snapshots of my searches in Google. The number of hits I got for each keyword in quotes (to make them more specific) are as follows :

1. Planet Earth : 13,500,000 hits.
2. An Inconvenient Truth : 1,720,000 hits.

I thought the number of hits were a little lower than what I expected. So, I googled up Madonna and Lindsay lohan (two of the most popular worldwide celebrities) and their snapshots are here below :

I was very disturbed to find that Madonna and Lindsay Lohan commanded far more google hits than a search for this planet and arguably one of the finest documentaries ever to be made on the most pressing global issue. However, I continued and looked up if people were concerned at all with "climate change" ! and thankfully, they were. The keywords "climate change" brought up 57,500,000 hits. This is still quite less than the number of hits scored by the pop diva
( 75,600,000 hits !).

This is the trend in just the past 30 days where Madonna clearly seems more important than the climate !

I am not arguing that we are a bunch of flesh crazy or celebrity driven populace. I am trying to show that the most powerful medium that we have to look into the issues of the world, namely the internet is being used more for peering into the private lives of celebrities. There are more serious issues at stake and our trends online show that we are more concerned with short time pleasures.

Al Gore makes several important points in his movie. It is not yet late to save the planet. But, for that to happen, our attitude should change. Going by the way hits turn up at Google, we are still a long way away from that.