It’s only one click… The hidden impact of our daily technological use
Miguel Vicente, member of the ECREA Executive Board, member of the Science and Environment Section
Human communication has drastically changed during the last century. Mass media shifted the amount, reach and depth of communication exchanges throughout the 20th century. It is necessary to understand the consolidation of press, radio and television to know how the world worked for several decades. However, there has been an additional leap in the last fifty years, with digital communication rapidly becoming commonplace across the planet. Even though obvious and diverse inequalities impede its spread, the Internet has turned into a space for a growing part of humankind: one can hardly imagine our current daily life without computers, mobile phones, tablets, email and several other new realities defining our times. One of the several strengths of digitalization is the increasing access to online worlds, where human relations are experiencing an ongoing transformation without any necessary offline connection.
Digital ICT are referred to very often as a remarkable step forward in facing the environmental challenges of the current era: for instance, working online from our homes is usually presented as a good way to reduce emissions while commuting to and from our workplace, and also as a good individual and family solution when combining domestic tasks and external labour. Shifting to online environments are perceived, consequently, as a greening solution. However, and even though it is hard to clearly measure it, sending email, surfing the web or enjoying streaming services do have an environmental impact, even though this impact remains unnoticed for most of us.
As individuals developing our careers within academia, we use our technological devices extensively and intensively. From time to time, one can find open questions, media stories and research articles dealing with the negative consequences of this technological dependence, but most of them place their interest on the psychological and physiological damage at the individual level, and the related effects on social life around individuals. Consciousness regarding the environmental impact of our daily decisions is not portrayed as often in the news or in our scientific journals. No one neglects the benefits arising from the digital revolution experienced in recent decades, but it might be worth emphasizing that these changes and gains are also leading to environmental impacts on our planet. Sustainability policies must take into account these impacts and incorporate them into complex calculations to face the urgent and growing climate challenges present on our horizon.
In order to frame adequately the size of this challenge, a deeper analysis and a critical perspective is required. Key metaphors that are very common nowadays, like services stored in clouds, evoke a natural and ethereal space collecting the growing amount of data, and hiding the material side of these ICT systems. In the current platform society, with an unstoppable presence of individuals demanding permanent access to Internet services, the energy bill will not decrease, challenging the sustainability of the current system of production and consumption. Data centres are becoming central actors in the international electricity markets, which shows in terms of their emissions, too. The role played by leading global platforms stills needs to be discussed by those tackling the consequences arising from these giants.
The environmental impact of ICT usage can be identified, at least, in three different stages of the life cycle of technological devices:
First, the design and production phase. The commercial demand for devices remains constant for several years, whereas the amount of users keeps growing with the incorporation of new social territories, and with groups and audiences stepping for the first time into the current technological age. Geopolitical issues are also behind the production chains, fostering conflicts in the Global South due to the appropriation and redistribution of the so called “conflict or blood minerals”, such as coltan.
Second, technological consumption is still on the rise, claiming around 7% of the total global consumption of energy. The abusive usage of smartphones and other gadgets is endangering the planet. Consumption is pushed by actors, who have authority over strategic actions relating to technological development and advertising of the products. Programmed obsolence is a well-known term, forcing consumers to update their devices very frequently and to replace them in case of any small disadvantage: the advertising industry promotes lifestyles based on an intense consumption strategy and technological manufacturers are offering their products and updates in ever shorter periods of time.
And third, waste management confronts all of us with the unavoidable evidence of technological materiality. A society, where fast and frequent replacement of existing technological devices by new ones id promoted, must first develop a critical consciousness among its citizens, regarding both their use and exchange values. The size of the problem – which is now turning into uncontrolled accumulation of technological devices in the Global South, like Ghana, coming from the North, where they were designed and used – and the complex international relations behind it, was portrayed several times by diverse filmmakers.
A critical understanding of the ongoing environmental crisis, and its direct relation with the unequal global distribution of resources and damage, requires combining the three abovementioned stages in our analyses, as the full cycle of production, consumption and waste management needs to be identified and controlled.
From its very foundation, ECREA has placed environmental challenges at the forefront of its priorities. The Science and Environmental Communication Section has covered extensively the key topics of a field that grows fuelled by the urgency of the responses to climate change impacts. But even within this highly conscious and skilled group of scholars, the digital footprint is usually placed behind other priorities. One cannot imagine an association like ECREA without the role played by digital ICT, but identifying the environmental impact of our daily lives, as individuals and as members of diverse social groups, turns into a necessary first step to increase our climate awareness and gain some opportunity to react in time to partially mitigate climate change and to adapt to the ongoing transformations.
