I gave a seminar yesterday about my ideas of how internet could be more sustainable, both from an environmental perspective, both also from a personal / society perspective.
In the website sustainableinternet.org you’ll find all the guidelines and the possibility to comment and participate!
Here is the presentation:

I always mention the possibility of ICT for revealing invisible data as energy, CO2 emissions, environmental impact… to the consumers.

But one risk of ICT is that it works also in the other direction, hiding environmental impacts and processes behind a web façade. One example I experienced recently was when I ordered postcards from Moo (from where I used to get my visit cards sent from London) and I discovered that the package was sent “par air” from New Zealand. For the consumer this process is completely opaque and there was no way for me to know that my postcards would fly half world to arrive in my postbox.

We need to think of ways of minimizing this, how do we provide consumers transparent information about the products they are buying? How do we make people to care of that information?

An interesting white paper from Ericsson, about how to achieve energy-efficient, sustainable mobile communications through network optimization, site optimization and alternative energy sources.

Ericsson projects regarding sustainability includes the use of renewable energy for both network equipment and also some other small projects as solar power mobile chargers.

One example is with China Mobile, running 252 wind and solar sites in Inner Mongolia. Photo from Ericsson.

Solar powered mobile charger. Photo from Ericsson.

In my opinion, this type of work is a good example of the relation between ICT and Sustainable Development, both by:

+ ICTD: Providing connectivity in developing rural areas, closing the digital divide.

+ Green IT: Reducing the environmental impact of  ICT infrastructure.

Adbusters has made a challenge call: disconnect during a week. turn off the computer, tv, mobile phone, stop using facebook, twitter, reading blogs. And use that time to reconnect with the environment and people around you.

First of all, are we ready to do that? How dependent of information technology have we become?

As a computer scientist and working with media I swing between a technocentric optimism (in which I can not stop feeling amazed about technological development and the oportunities that we have at hand), and tech-crisis where I question if we are using this technology in the right way. Is this really making our life better? Is it making our relationships and social environment better? Is it making the cities nicer places than before?

For answering this questions and to try to make a difference, I changed to study sustainable development and started my research. It is always good to reflect, to remind us that ICT and media is just a tool, that facebook is a tool to be used to improve our social life, not to substitute it, that we still live in a physical world and the real relationships with real people is what really matter, that email is a tool for improving our work, not the work itself. ICT was supposed to liberate our time, not to make us slaves of our computers, mobile phones are suppose to connect us with people, not to create asocial environments where everyone is disociated with the here and now.

I remember when I spilled a latte over my laptop and were two weeks without computer, I rediscovered the positive feeling of having much more time to spend with the people around me, maybe a digital detox week is a good idea (and cheaper than destroying your laptop..) to rethink: what do we really need computers to? are they the goal or just tools?

I think that these questions are central for the development of ICT and how it can be used in a sustainable society, both enabling global ideas and global conversations, but focusing on the local, on the here and now, making things easier, not more difficult, making us to talk more with our neighbors, to explore more our environment.