So in my previous post, I made some predictions about the media landscape of the future, of how the convergence between the 'traditional' and the 'new' will progress through the proliferation of media (from an advertisers perspective).
As someone who cares about the environment, its important to realise what this 'digital revolution' will translate to if information and communication technology (ICT) doesn't evolve quick enough and companies continue to have an incumbent approach to sustainability. Hence this post, from a Greenie's perspective.
There's no denying that digital presents great opportunity to limit footprint but its important to remember that whilst there's an element of intangibility, digital data needs to be stored somewhere in the real world (aka 'Cloud').
Presuming the over reliance on non-renewable energy continues, what will be the impact within ICT?
Well at present only 25% of the world is connected to the internet. This is due to change, Africa is one of the latest continents to become 'connected' and adoption is going to continue to grow exponentially in the coming years.
There are more than one billion PCs and laptops currently in use, and that number is expected to grow to four billion by 2020 - that's an increase of 400% in ten years. A lot of people perceive the internet as a given or a right, but we must remind ourselves in the Western world- we still represent a minority.
ICT emissions are the same as the Aviation industry and yet for some reason ICT is largely ignored in the debate on emissions (even though its predicted to increase to 6% by 2020 - equal to the output of the Steal Industry). Is it because we can't see it? We certainly think about it when printing on paper or catching a plane. In one year it is estimated that an average server produces as much CO2 emissions as a family car... To put this in to perspective; Google is said to have somewhere between 700,000 to 1 million servers.
Lets look at 'emerging media' Google Search in more detail...
“The global search market continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with both highly developed and emerging markets contributing to the strong growth worldwide,” said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president. “Search is clearly becoming a more ubiquitous behavior among Internet users that drives navigation not only directly from search engines but also within sites and across networks. If you equate the advancement of search with the ability of humans to cultivate information, then the world is rapidly becoming a more knowledgeable ecosystem.”
What does that mean in terms of emissions? Well according to Google, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. In 2009 there were 2.9 million searches conducted per minute by internet users over 15 according to commScore (an annual growth of over 40%) and Google accounted for 66.8% of these. Using my incredible mental arithmetic here: that's 1,937,200 Google searches per minute which according to them; equates to nearly three weeks worth of the average US households electricity consumption. That - all in one minute!
Within the advertising industry we've seen more content rich websites, 3D gaming, the advent of augmented realities and witnessed the progression of the ubur connected individual through social networks. This (much to my excitement) a demonstration of the breadth and evolution of digital communication and yet, often overlooked, consequently puts greater demands on data storage and energy use.
“Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” says Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power and lots of it! This is obviously not limited to search but across the internet infrastructure, its massive, behemoth and growing really really really fast.
Needless to say digital technologies do much to also limit carbon output, digital content and tools enable us to do many things quicker, with better quality, using fewer resources. But we must also consider the increase in e-waste and electricity consumption created as a consequence to the digital revolution. The challenge is to improve the environmental sustainability of the digital technologies we use and to use technology effectively to reduce resource consumption at the same time.
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