Book : Computing Our Way to Paradise?
The Role of Internet and Communication Technologies
in Sustainable Consumption and Globalization, Robert
Rattle
Chapter : 6
From Social Meanings to Global Conformity : ICTs and
the Global Commons
Norismiza Ismail (G0406212)
CT60A7000 - Green IT and Sustainable Computing
INTRODUCTION
• Overall this chapter explore
• The life-cycle assessment
• ICTs Contributions
• The ICTs social dimensions
• Their adoption an adaptations
• Forces driving and influencing their development
• Social processes
• Norms of behavior
• Institutional arrangements that help determine how ICTs will be
used
• Implications for sustainable consumptions
• To reveal the potentially enormous implications of ICTs
• How ICTs are affecting consumption activities
Subtopics covered ...
1.
ENVIRONMENTAL
IMPACTS OF ICTS
2. THE REBOUND
EFFECT
3. SOCIAL
PROCESSES OF
CONSUMPTION
4. META-LEVEL
IMPACT
5. WHAT WENT
WRONG?
(Issue)
6. GLOBAL
HEGEMONY OR
CULTURAL
GENOCIDE?
(Issue)
1. ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF ICTS
Indirect
Direct
From life-cycle
use
From the substitution,
optimization or
complementarity
• existing products, services and
processes
• Their creation of new products,
services and processes
Can be significant, conceptually
challenging to understand
complex to measure
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1.
Technological
Expectations
4. Induction,
Supplementation
and Creation
ICTs
Environmental
Effect
3. Substitution
and
Optimization
2. Social
Reorientation
– Macro Level
1. Technological Expectations
• Significant implications for energy and materials consumption
• Highly material- and energy-intensive activities
• Many elements of ICTs contain toxic materials, which all eventually end up in
the waste stream
• Example :
• A six-inch silicon wafer requires 8.6 m3 of deionized water, 9 kg of hazardous
chemicals, and 285 kWh of electricity – Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition report
(2000)
• In the Waste Stream - Goldberg (1998) estimates there are fourteen to
twenty million computers scrapped each year; 10 to 15 percent of them are
reused or recycled, 15 percent end up in landfill sites, and the remainder are
stockpiled by users.
1. Technological Expectations (Cont’)
• The toxic materials contained within ICTs are an increasing source of
concern
• Example :
• Personal computers
• occupy significant volumes in landfill sites
• toxic constituent parts also pose significant health risks.
• The largest source of heavy metals, toxic materials, and organic
pollutants in municipal trash
Most ICTs are discarded and considered obsolete long before
they cease to function, Social Forces driving these trends
rather than Technological Forces are!
1. Technological Expectations (Cont’)
• Key to understanding the impacts of ICTs will be these Social Forces.
Why?
• ICTs is spreading rapidly around the globe
• characterized by
• rapid replacement rates,
• enticing new consumers,
• advancing niche markets, and
• enslaving seasoned consumers
• New and innovative applications are constantly emerging
• These practices function to establish and reinforce social norms that
further drive their acquisition and application (Ropke, 2001).
• ICTs have materialized in virtually every sector (Plepys, 2002).
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2. Social Reorientation – Macro Level
Five (5) Categories how ICTs may be expected to
influence consumption activity can be identified
• ICTs replace an existing product, process, or activity.
Optimization
• ICTs optimize the efficiency of an existing product, process,
or activity.
Induction
• The application of ICTs induces the greater use of an
existing product, process, or activity (old “extended” use).
Supplementation
Creation
• A new ICT product, service, or process supplements or
complements (adds to or enhances the utility of) an existing
product, service, or activity (new application).
• ICTs create a new niche or application for a new ICT
product, service, or activity.
INDIRECT
DIRECT
Substitution
2. THE REBOUND EFFECT
•
•
•
Originally identified in the energy sector
an effective increase in the consumption of an energy service after its price
decreases due to the higher efficiency of the production of the service.
Example:
• If technological progress makes certain equipment more energy or
materials efficient, less energy or materials are needed to produce the
same amount of products or services.
• As the cost per unit of production and operation falls, demand for that
product or service may rise. Increased consumption in the aggregate
may limit or surpass the gains made through efficiency.
• Ayres, Ayres, and Warr describe this “growth engine” as “a positive
feedback loop involving declining costs of inputs and increasing demand
for lower priced outputs, which then drives costs down further, thanks to
economies of scale and learning effects” (Ayres, Ayres, & Warr, 2003,
219).
2. THE REBOUND EFFECT (Cont’)
• The Process (Greening, Greene & Difiglio)
• Micro- Level
• Complex System
As these results are scaled up, economy-wide effects may also
appear, resulting from price and quantity readjustments across
economic sectors in a nonstatic situation
transformational effects are a consequence of changes in
consumer preferences, social norms and institutions, and the
organization of production.
Ultimately, these effects result from fundamental Social Forces.
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2. THE REBOUND EFFECT (Cont’)
•
The Rebound Effect to the Social Reality
•
•
Paradox for national governments (advanced economy countries)
Global level
• The role of long-neglected social processes, such as market forces and
human behavior, in energy and materials consumption must now be
confronted.
• Dematerialization or eco-efficiency
• It’s necessary but not a sufficient condition for approaching the goal of
sustainability (Hilty & Ruddy, 2000)
• technological progress such as improved efficiency is a necessary, but
insufficient, condition for sustainability (Langhelle,2000)
• Sufficiency may instead be a more appropriate objective, which ventures a
radical shift in values (Reisch, 2001).
• The beneficial transformational effects of ICTs are a function of their
potential to improve efficiency through dematerialization, esubstitution,
production optimization, and product efficiencies. (ASSIST, 2002;
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, 2001; et. al).
2. THE REBOUND EFFECT (Cont’)
•
Example: The Internet
• Offers :
•
•
•
•
a set of powerful marketing tools
able to target, direct, and guide specific consumers and consumer groups
affect perceptions and lifestyles
attempt consumers into the trap of the “illusion of control” over consumption
(Reisch,2001).
• simply facilitate education and empowerment and promote more sustainable
lifestyles, targeting, guiding, and directing more sustainable shifts.
• The latter is very unlikely to spontaneously emerge, and will therefore
require significant investment and effort by (national and global)
governments (Greiner, Radermacher, & Rose, 1996; Heinonen, Jokinen,
& Kaivooja, et. Al)
• Governments must pay particular attention to the social conditions from
which the necessary changes will be derived.
THE REBOUND EFFECT (Cont’)
Clearly, a technology itself does not determine how it will be
applied. Technologies are never neutral.
They reflect cultural values
and biases (Milbrath, 1989, 232; Smyth, 1990).
The societal and institutional
dynamics that emerge from these biases and values are key
to better understanding the social conditions within which ICTs coevolve.
3. SOCIAL PROCESSES OF
CONSUMPTION
Important social process that helps shape consumption behavior :
• Identity Formation
• Advertising, marketing, branding, subtle messaging, and promotions
have become effective tools used in a variety of combinations to
elicit product and company loyalty and overcome consumption
barriers.
•
•
•
The growth process that has displaced traditional experiences has become
highly creative
Domain conflicts, where contradictions occur as people shift domains
Specialty uses might drive the acquisition of more than one type or style of
product
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3. SOCIAL PROCESSES OF
CONSUMPTION
Case Study: Cellular telephones
Functionality
expanding
• Smaller
• More compact
• More versatile
New acquisitions
List of functions
expanding
•Ability to master and
own latest and newest
functions
•Trends convey
important social signals
to other peers
•Produce photo and
movies
•Fashion and styles
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Older variants no
longer prove
functional or
practical (Pull from
Technology)
•As conventions and
institutions change
•Tools and
implementation also
change
Finally, older
variants may
no longer
prove
functional or
practical
4. META-LEVEL IMPACT
• Ropke (2001) demonstrated that the behavior of adopting new
domestic technologies forms an integral part of several dynamic
forces behind increased consumption and accelerating rates of
consumption.
• By adopting advanced manufacturing technologies—such as ICTs—
in response to competitive market forces, businesses exhibit similar
renewal processes intended to improve efficiencies.
• Dilemma of technological equipment cost recovery—without the
increased product volumes—over reduced product and process
lifetimes.
• Consumption increased, but the rate of consumption also increased
(Schnaiberg)
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5. WHAT WENT WRONG?
• Technological shortcomings
• Unable to immediately compete on the market due to the risks of
developing new technologies and their initially low performance
characteristics
• Declining costs lead to declining prices, which drive increased
consumption.
• Ayres (1998, 2001, 2002) has argued that energy and materials
consumption function within the economy as much as a driver of growth
as a consequence of growth. This growth mechanism, or growth engine,
is a feedback process.
• “The falling costs per performance unit increased the cost–utility ratio
and made computers more valuable to substitute for other commodities
as well as increased their use in new applications. The effect is
increased energy and material consumption in ICT hardware in total”
(Plepys, 2002, 513).
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6. GLOBAL HEGEMONY or
CULTURAL GENOCIDE
•
Many Aboriginal peoples, sometimes through their own participation in formal
wage economies, are now discovering that their previous traditional practices
have become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to sustain.
•
Profound impact on the way of life of traditional peoples.
•
The long-range transport of pollutants, climate change, ozone depletion and loss of
biological diversity, intrusion of “development” into subsistence lands, and arbitrary
reshaping of political boundaries have extended the reach of global consumption
activity to every corner of the planet.
•
The inclusion of foreign industry in the competition for a limited resource base
threatens the traditional activities of Aboriginal populations(Novek&Kampen).
•
Alienation of traditional lands endures through the sanctioned licensing by
national governments of major resource exploitation projects.
•
These effects are fundamentally a result of our increasingly less sustainable
consumption trajectories and their globalization.
6. GLOBAL HEGEMONY or
CULTURAL GENOCIDE (Cont’)
• What are ICTs Roles in these trajectories ?
• Open source software is widely adopted and spread to nations where
repressive regimes manipulate information and communications as an
attempt to counterbalance censorship.
• ICTs can and do empower low- and middle-income countries and
traditional cultures and communities.
• The application of ICTs to empower and learn from other cultures
manifests a tangible likelihood that they may draw these peoples into
the consumer society with all its cultural baggage: consumer and
producer lock in to materialistic growth processes and structured
inequality.
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Q&A
Considering aggregate energy and materials throughput globally,
we continue to move in the wrong direction. Continuing to assault
both natural ecosystems and human health in the process, potentially
including our long-term survival, is certainly unproductive.
Technological and production efficiencies have not succeeded in
reducing the scale of the global human economy. Classical economic
growth clearly has not reduced inequalities. Perhaps it is time to
consider the framework from which these tools have been derived.
We need to explore the forces shaping our social processes and
institutional structures.
What is ultimately guiding behavior and lifestyle choices?
Q&A
Thank you