We’ve all heard that talking to plants helps them grow, but haven’t you heard? Nobody talks out loud anymore. We IM and text and tweet — talking is so last year. And, as Jess Leber at FastCoExist reports, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science is getting with the times, investigating the effect of social media on plant growth. It’s set up an experiment where you can talk to a plant on Twitter and try to help it grow.

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Marketing and design agency Carmichael Lynch developed a “custom tweet-to-speech” technology for the project. An Arduino device reads each tweet outloud to one plant. “The other plant, sadly, sits in silence,” the firm says.

So far, on Day 2 of the experiment, the plant that has company is in a very slight lead. It is an inch taller, and has slightly larger and greener leaves.

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Perfect for those of us who would rather communicate by typing, but who still want to contribute to plant health.

We feel sort of bad for the lonely plant, and we can’t help but wonder: is our growth being stunted because we work alone? Maybe we should co-work more often. Or just get this Tweet-to-speech technology, so that we can hear all our Twitter friends talk to us.