For years now we have been actively using the Internet, steadily learning to incorporate emerging technologies to ascertain levels of multimodality in our daily
lives. In many ways, the Internet has redefined our landscape as writers... but it's important not to forget from where we draw our inspiration-- our real, tangible landscape, our environment. The organic world is a source of wonder, a space of natural phenomena, and almost always cognitively separate from the seeming sterility of the technological world. But with the evolution of our resources, technology has grown and is impacting the environment. As writers, we are faced now with more than the world, with cyberspace and multimodality. If the Internet is a space of intertextuallity, then why is the environment not yet a text? Our knowledge base has potential to become infinte and as our modern western society grows increasingly more digital, there are
decisions that need to be made about the way in which we utilize these new tools in direct inter-relation to the living world around us.
Kevin Slavin said quite eloquently in his TED talk on 'How Algorithms Shape Our World' that "there's an uneasy collaboration between nature and man, and now, there's this third corroboratory force". Slavin claims it's algorithms, but in a way it very much can be seen as technology as a whole. The Internet, multimodal education, new tools, and technologies are constantly shaping the way we view the space we live in. Not only do they shape how we see and interact with the world,but often silently, they change it.
Since the digital economy is already using a tenth of the world's energy, to avoid industrial scale damage to the environment we must ask questions now that will set media use on a sustainable path. How can we expect to see the Internet, and the companies that work within it, grow more renewable? We must ask what we are doing to head down a path of environmental consciousness, and what we will continue to do in the future as our world becomes more dependent on technology?
Like any growing industry, profit will weigh in significantly for businesses and the scale will be tipped toward more development, leaving the environment to assume a heavy debt in the name of progress. That is, unless we become informed consumers, users and most of all, writers so we can use this connectivity to find voices to speak for marginalized entities. The use of multimedia is now an undeniable part of our lives, with the Americans not only watching an average of 5 hours of television per night, but 50 percent of them using another form of media while they watch (Marketing Land).
With all of this multi-tasking (figure 1), consumption of media is at an all-time high. We, as a people, have more access to online tools and resources, and we, as writers, are not doing enough to use these resources to advocate for more environmental practices. The click of a mouse is no longer needed- phones have become just as powerful sources for information. But, what's in an iPhone? Apple released an environmental mission statement saying on their site, "We have a big responsibility to leave a smaller footprint". So far, the company has made (relative) good on this, and looking to figure 2 we can see that the amount of energy needed to run a mac today is 97 percent less than their first release in 1998-- a step in the right direction. On their website they go on to claim that they understand the scale of which their global product emits greenhouse gases contributing to climate change-- but as consumers, are we willing to let this be enough? At what point do we stop holding companies responsible for their products? And what about the mass amount of energy it takes to run something like the Internet in the first place?
Internet and media use is growing at such an exponential rate-- unlike any other industry we have seen-- that it is now critical that we demand companies and consumers to be actively liable for the unseen degradation,before action becomes virally overdue. We cannot separate our ability to be multimodal and the environmental consequences.
Kevin Slavin said quite eloquently in his TED talk on 'How Algorithms Shape Our World' that "there's an uneasy collaboration between nature and man, and now, there's this third corroboratory force". Slavin claims it's algorithms, but in a way it very much can be seen as technology as a whole. The Internet, multimodal education, new tools, and technologies are constantly shaping the way we view the space we live in. Not only do they shape how we see and interact with the world,but often silently, they change it.
Since the digital economy is already using a tenth of the world's energy, to avoid industrial scale damage to the environment we must ask questions now that will set media use on a sustainable path. How can we expect to see the Internet, and the companies that work within it, grow more renewable? We must ask what we are doing to head down a path of environmental consciousness, and what we will continue to do in the future as our world becomes more dependent on technology?
Like any growing industry, profit will weigh in significantly for businesses and the scale will be tipped toward more development, leaving the environment to assume a heavy debt in the name of progress. That is, unless we become informed consumers, users and most of all, writers so we can use this connectivity to find voices to speak for marginalized entities. The use of multimedia is now an undeniable part of our lives, with the Americans not only watching an average of 5 hours of television per night, but 50 percent of them using another form of media while they watch (Marketing Land).
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| Figure 1: Graph of multimedia use, 2014 |
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| Figure 2, Apple energy consumption 1998-today (apple.com) |
Internet and media use is growing at such an exponential rate-- unlike any other industry we have seen-- that it is now critical that we demand companies and consumers to be actively liable for the unseen degradation,before action becomes virally overdue. We cannot separate our ability to be multimodal and the environmental consequences.
To understand this paradigm, we first must ask what, exactly, is multimodality? How did this term come to be used, and why was there a vernacular need? According to the glossary of multimedia terms, it can be defined as:
Look very literally here at the use of the phrase 'spatial aspects of interaction and environments, and the relationship between these'. The glossary opens up multimodality broadly, including elements like environment that are often forgotten when considering implications of new ideas or methodologies. This is key to understanding the whole picture-- like any cultural shift, certain aspects become marginalized and in human history this has meant that the environment becomes nothing more than a commodity. Though there are recent efforts to reconcile this type of thinking on a small level, not enough is being done to prevent it from perpetuating. One of the largest contributors is a hidden one-- the Internet. No one 'owns' it, so who can we hold accountable? How about the networks?
The Internet, despite the way it often feels, is still ‘new’ in broad considerations. As Anil Dash explains in his talk at the Good Experience Live (GEL) conference, the Internet is a 'new' tool, and it connects us to widely better networks than we could ever manage without the World Wide Web. Dash is compelling, almost pleading with the audience, in an attempt to open the eyes of a world that has opportunity hooked, yet seems uninterested in reeling it in. It's with these new tools that we have the absolute privilege and opportunity to be informed, to know what is happening in the world around us. But what's really important here is that these tools also give us the chance and the platform as writers to demand more accountability, more responsibility for actions that may contribute to the destruction of the environment. To do this though, it is imperative that we fully understand the level of gross proliferation that our tools, namely the Internet as a whole, have already experienced, so we can prepare ourselves for the level of growth that is still on the horizon. If we can trace the roots of its past and fully grasp how much has changed at such a rapid pace we will be able to situate ourselves more accurately in the future, and partake in fundamental changes for the use and creation of multimedia. If we look to Figure 1, a timeline of notable contributors to the rise of the Internet, we can see how quickly multimodality emerged and locate the places where this technology has shifted shape over the infinitely small span of its existence.
Figure 3: The Internet- A Timeline.
Be sure to roll your mouse over each event, click individually and to scroll completely through the interactive features. Utilize hyperlinks by opening them in a new window or tab.
Be sure to roll your mouse over each event, click individually and to scroll completely through the interactive features. Utilize hyperlinks by opening them in a new window or tab.
(You can access this timeline externally here-- check out the list option on the bottom right to see the timeline displayed as an indexed record)
Image sources actively linked. Stat. sources: Infoplease, UNCP
WC: 1081, created by LBrayton
All these changes, all this growth, what does it mean for the environment? The unfortunate reality is expressed in the video below from Greenpeace, "How Dirty is Your Data?", and it's a shocking truth. Right now, as we participate in media culture, we are degrading our environment. As we write and post and blog and tweet, we are a part of the problem. Watch the video to hear to what extent.
On the timeline, take note of the entry in December of 1996, a mere 18 years ago was the now mega-mogul Google's inception. We see this same sort of 'boom' with popular sites like Facebook or YouTube in the timeline. But in less than 20 years, Google has expanded from a base of 10,000 queries per day to almost 47,000 searches a second today. The changes in the company have been immense, and the shifts in energy consumption had no choice but to grow with the brand. Within the last ten years, Google has made it a clear initiative (and business venture) to run their data centers off of sustainable energy. They claim "data centers are designed to use as little energy as possible" using temperature controls, recycling water for cooling, and renewable energy to help power their facilities (google.com/green/efficiency). In fact, the company has invested over $1.5 billion in renewable projects, like wind and solar energies. One of the most impacting projects that Google has taken on is their SunPower energy investment which helps install solar panels in residential homes so that the average American is more apt to act on green energy by making cost is less of a factor in decision making. Despite a long list on Google's website of their green efforts, only 35% of Google's total electricity is renewable (google.com).
With all the money and resources that Google is investing in other companies, why do they not operate at 100% renewable energy? They note that they offset or "neutralize" the remainder of their carbon footprint through some of the projects they fund, but is this trade-off fair to the environment? Can we shrug off responsibility through displacement?
It's easy to assume that technology is a relatively 'clean', after all there's no direct environmental harm, right? No, we're just using the Internet. We're just sending a text message, just googling images of David Beckham (Google even has a chart of global interest him over time...). But when four billion users are simultaneously browsing the web, the energy consumption is multiplied by that same 4 billion. If the video above didn't put it in perspective, the difference in energy globally between something as small as those who use Yahoo email and those who use Gmail is equivalent to the entire annual electricity consumption of the country Barbados (inhabitat.com)-- no small feat.
The type of scale we are considering here is so large, it's virtually unfathomable. Though these companies are keeping sustainability in the back of their codes of conduct, the truth of the matter is, as we can see from the recent past, the Internet and media as a whole is growing too rapidly for this to be sufficient; for these efforts to be enough. In order to be truly sustainable, leading companies like Apple, who supply the technology we use to connect, and Google, which dominates the form through which we share and receive information, have to be held accountable at the same pace that their field is expanding. This means no carbon footprint, 100% renewable operating systems, effort and innovation. And, as much as we don't want to realize it, we have to be accountable, too as consumers and participants. That means writers need to produce text that ask the kinds of questions we have been asking, and compose projects like Greenpeace's video that will get people, and companies, thinking. We need an environmental call to action. If we fail, and it's arguable that we already are, the environment yet again will suffer the consequences of human oversight. Surely, since we have the knowledge and the tools, and now thanks to the vast Internet, the networks, this will not remain an unresolved problem.
Ted Nelson once said "The four walls of paper are like a prison because every idea wants to spring out in all directions - everything is connected with everything else, sometimes more than others". If are rooted in conventional thinking and boxed in by paper prisons, we have been handed the tools that can sever these restraints and immerse us in a wider world than we could have possibly imaged 20 years ago. But in this revelation and progression, we mustn't forget our role as writers to speak for those who cannot- to give voice to environmental concerns and to rise up to ask for change when it is undoubtedly needed. Everything is connected: this Earth, this virtual space, this text: they are the words, they are 'the thing itself' (Woolf).
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| Figure 4: Google Energy Distribution (Google.com) |
It's easy to assume that technology is a relatively 'clean', after all there's no direct environmental harm, right? No, we're just using the Internet. We're just sending a text message, just googling images of David Beckham (Google even has a chart of global interest him over time...). But when four billion users are simultaneously browsing the web, the energy consumption is multiplied by that same 4 billion. If the video above didn't put it in perspective, the difference in energy globally between something as small as those who use Yahoo email and those who use Gmail is equivalent to the entire annual electricity consumption of the country Barbados (inhabitat.com)-- no small feat.
The type of scale we are considering here is so large, it's virtually unfathomable. Though these companies are keeping sustainability in the back of their codes of conduct, the truth of the matter is, as we can see from the recent past, the Internet and media as a whole is growing too rapidly for this to be sufficient; for these efforts to be enough. In order to be truly sustainable, leading companies like Apple, who supply the technology we use to connect, and Google, which dominates the form through which we share and receive information, have to be held accountable at the same pace that their field is expanding. This means no carbon footprint, 100% renewable operating systems, effort and innovation. And, as much as we don't want to realize it, we have to be accountable, too as consumers and participants. That means writers need to produce text that ask the kinds of questions we have been asking, and compose projects like Greenpeace's video that will get people, and companies, thinking. We need an environmental call to action. If we fail, and it's arguable that we already are, the environment yet again will suffer the consequences of human oversight. Surely, since we have the knowledge and the tools, and now thanks to the vast Internet, the networks, this will not remain an unresolved problem.
Ted Nelson once said "The four walls of paper are like a prison because every idea wants to spring out in all directions - everything is connected with everything else, sometimes more than others". If are rooted in conventional thinking and boxed in by paper prisons, we have been handed the tools that can sever these restraints and immerse us in a wider world than we could have possibly imaged 20 years ago. But in this revelation and progression, we mustn't forget our role as writers to speak for those who cannot- to give voice to environmental concerns and to rise up to ask for change when it is undoubtedly needed. Everything is connected: this Earth, this virtual space, this text: they are the words, they are 'the thing itself' (Woolf).
