Sustainability in a Digital World
In an increasingly consumer focused society, how are our consumption habits being translated to the digital world?
Photo credit: Atakirus, https://www.deviantart.com/atakirus
We live in a consumer society, buying largely unnecessary and nonessential things. I know from myself if I were to strip back my spending to only essential items, I’d have a lot more money and a lot less stuff.
Mass production has made consumerism a lot easier, more accessible and at times more affordable. Fast fashion has fuelled an industry of poorly manufactured clothes which are cheap to purchase because the trends are often short lived and replaced by the next new thing within a season.
In order to keep costs low and profits high, items are manufactured against poor quality control standards, by underskilled people who are subjected to poor working conditions and are paid less than a living wage. Audits are not undertaken on a regular basis, making it difficult to maintain standards for employee safety and product quality.
As we move further into the digital age, we’re seeing similarities in the production of digital products. There is an increasingly high demand for software products in today’s consumer market. The high demand means products are developed at an expedited rate, compromising overall quality. If software engineers were to take their time to develop high quality products, it would take too much time and the product would potentially no longer be in demand. So the trade-off is buggy software released at a fast pace and quickly replaced with a new trend to meet changing consumer demands. As time-to-market is a priority, best software engineering practices are not always upheld. This means quality control is difficult to maintain.
An accelerated time-to-market also means higher levels of abstraction in software. Abstraction reduces complexity to simplify a problem. The issue with this is the oversimplification of a problem, with finer crucial details being overlooked. There are necessary levels of complexity in every system that influence the robustness and rigor of that system.
What’s also interesting is how materials are sourced. Looking at that from the fast fashion lens, manufacturers source inexpensive synthetic materials that can be produced quickly. These synthetic materials take decades to biodegrade. Clothing makes up almost eight percent of waste in landfills, and the more available these cheap materials are, the more they will end up in our landfills. [1]
Now shifting to a digital lens, the required material for software is data and data can be sourced unsustainably. Consider how data was collected, what permissions and level of transparency were used when collecting the data, was the data collected directly by the manufacturer or was it purchased from a third party, what privacy implications are associated with that data, and once a software product becomes obsolete, what happens to the data?
There are also sustainability considerations for how the materials for physical hardware are sourced and disposed of. For example, a typical microchip, weighing roughly two grams, takes 1.6 kilograms of fossil fuel, 72 grams of chemicals and 32 kilograms of water to manufacture [2].
The reality is digital is not always sustainable. There is an increasing lack of awareness of the impact of purchasing decisions on the environment, and the idea of digital products being more sustainable may exacerbate this. Digital products appear more sustainable on the surface; however, the reality of developing and manufacturing these products comes with both sustainability and ethical concerns.
Conscious consumption has the potential to change things. As consumers, we have an opportunity to think about the impacts our purchasing decisions have on the environment and how we can positively change consumption patterns for the decades to come.
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