"Are you active in sports or exercise activities in the last six months?" Unless surfing online is considered a sport, then I'd have to say no. But who's asking? Apparently the government, because that was question number D32, page 13 of the Population and Housing Census 2011. As I sit here and ponder why, many people living in Brunei will be filling in the substantial booklet, the size of a mini novella. The front of the booklet says that all this information is sought so that the government can plan "our future together".
According to the latest figures online, Brunei Darussalam's population stands at approximately 401,890 people. That's less than the population of Bristol.
The upside of living in a small town is the peace, the close community. It should be easier to make a green environment. You can invite many people to your wedding and a small population adapts easily and quickly.
But there's also hardly a day that goes by when you don't get recognised for being your parents’ child. When everyone is connected, in one way or the other to everyone else, the community can get too close for comfort. Often we feel the downside of our small population. A relatively small purchasing power means one business opens and another closes. Skills and experience are not easily obtained or retained and need to be imported.
Last Sunday Brunei's most followed twitterer @BruneiTweet started a challenge to get the hash tag #OurBrunei trending globally on Twitter.
Putting a hash #, on a "tweet" makes that entry searchable by the word so tagged. Twitter collates all the tagged words, or topics, and ascertains what people are talking about. The most popular subjects across the world are "trending" globally. The local twitter community, abroad and at home, friends of Brunei, rallied around and hash-tagged the words "OurBrunei" to plenty of tweets about the country.
Did we manage to trend globally? No we didn't. But around 1400 twitterers sent out enough positive tweets about the country that #OurBrunei echoed and trended in Petaling Jaya, population 480,000. We live in a small town folks. There are no two ways about it.
But I reckon the point was seeing whether it could be done. Just you know, have a dig have a go. It's all about human endeavour.
You may ask is it really a worthwhile endeavour to try to trend on twitter, given there are 125 million users? Or while we're at it, climb a mountain? But that's what sets humanity apart from the plants. Wasn't the urge to find out what is on the other side of the swamp what eventually caused life to drag itself out of the primordial bog?
One of my favourite tweets during the challenge was from local @sodesa, who tweeted that we need more participants, less spectators and commentators (I'm not trying to be ironic folks). So as far as I see it, trying to do something is always much better than being sedentary, sitting around.
Back to the Census, I'm sure that the results will be of use. But what's not so easy to measure is the sum of human endeavour. The difficult thing in planning for the future is how to encourage people to step out, to do something brave and be self-reliant.
@emmagoodegg
Illustration by Cuboi Art.
For the online version click here.
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