By Jan Lundberg
Posted July 1, 2009
It is true that the Internet has challenged the newspaper business like nothing else. The Internet has also changed social networking and activist organizing. But we must also see beyond the Internet, a system that banks on the notion of unlimited non-renewable resources for computers, power generation, and shipping through petroleum. The Internet also operates on
anonymity or the potential for it, as little face-to-face communication is required. Is that really the future?
From the comfort of an ivory observation tower, an Internet pundit for corporate America and ostensibly the public reflects on recent revolutionary changes in publishing:
“When people demand to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living though a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.” — Clay Shirky, Utne Reader July-Aug. 2009
This excellent logic can be transferred to other areas such as the technofix: people are demanding energy to use freely, and they believe that they’ve gone far enough by accepting the idea that oil or fossil fuels will be phased out voluntarily or otherwise. But they have a ground rule:
continued energy is the only way. To disagree is to deny science — or
that’s their implied accusation.
Meanwhile, researchers have estimated that one Internet search generates around 7 grams of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, due to the energy demands of Internet computers. One can defend this by pointing out that transportation and other major energy uses are many times the amount of computers’ use of energy, but the armchair energy analyst does not
appreciate that the energy industries cannot be reshaped into mini-versions of themselves for drastically reduced, special uses…
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Read the complete essay at http://culturechange.org/go.html?468
