Book : Computing Our Way to Paradise?The Role of Internet and Communication Technologies in Sustainable Consumption and Globalization, Robert Rattle

Chapter : 6From 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)

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1. ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF ICTS

From life-cycle use

Direct 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

Indirect

ICTs Environmental

Effect

1. Technological Expectations

2. Social Reorientation – Macro Level

3. Substitution and

Optimization

4. Induction, Supplementation

and Creation

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!

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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).

2. Social Reorientation – Macro LevelFive (5) Categories how ICTs may be expected to influence consumption activity can be identified

• ICTs replace an existing product, process, or activity.Substitution

• ICTs optimize the efficiency of an existing product, process, or activity.Optimization

• The application of ICTs induces the greater use of an existing product, process, or activity (old “extended” use).Induction

• 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).

Supplementation

• ICTs create a new niche or application for a new ICT product, service, or activity.Creation

DIRECT

INDIRECT

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).

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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 inconsumer preferences, social norms and institutions, and the

organization of production.

Ultimately, these effects result from fundamental Social Forces.

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.

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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 CONSUMPTIONCase Study: Cellular telephones

Functionality expanding• Smaller• More compact• More versatile

List of functions expanding•Produce photo and movies

•Fashion and styles

New acquisitions•Ability to master and own latest and newest functions

•Trends convey important social signals to other peers

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

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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)

• Many of these social processes and institutions have become fundamentally dependent on consumption activity (Sanne, 2002).

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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).

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.

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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.

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