Mapping Digital Waste
Minds Blown
We have a weekly meeting, every Friday lunchtime, to end our work week together. Sharing ideas we’ve been exploring and things we’ve been learning. It’s a great way to understand our individual areas of interests, plant seeds that cultivate common interests or new opportunities, and once in a while they’re so compelling that they change how we see things and become central to every project.
Three years ago our (then) digital director Kevin Horan dropped one of those into our lives when he introduced us to Gerry McGovern and his idea of digital waste. It’s one of those very simple ideas that’s pretty much invisible and so no one really thinks about it, but when you do start thinking about it a huge cartoon weight drops out of the sky, on to your head and you’re left with crosses for eyes and birds fluttering around your very sore brain. It’s the one time I’ve seen the whole team rendered speechless and when the mind blown 🤯 emoji was really, truly accurate.
So what is digital waste? Well, while we’re led to think that our digital world is environmentally clean, existing in carefree airy metaphors like ‘the cloud’, the truth is that all our digital footprints, and every digital interaction have a physical environmental weight. In some cases, a lot of weight. And while as individuals they may feel within our comfort zone in terms of CO2 emissions, as families, businesses, communities and societies it adds up shockingly quickly.
And this is where the ‘waste’ part comes in. This isn’t an idea about moving to a place where we don’t use technology, it’s about the fact that because we all think of the digital world as being environmentally clean, we really don’t consider how we use it and what the implications are, and so have been lured into habits and behaviours that unwittingly waste energy. In how we store, stream and share, in fact pretty much every part of our digital lives.
A conversation with Gerry blew our minds even further. He’s been working in and researching this area for a long time, and he shared the extent of this problem and how it weaves into every aspect of our lives. It inspired us to go deeper ourselves, and look further into where digital waste intertwines with our interactions, habits and behaviours.
Mapping Scenarios
We mapped out the problem space, to better understand where the ‘life challenges’ are. To make them clearer we defined 5 key scenarios that help bring things into sharper focus, so we might start doing something about them.
ATOMIC FAMILIES
Young families are big users of digital devices. Being busy, sometimes bored, everyone having different preferences, or just that they’ve never considered their digital habits. Sometimes high definition video can be streaming on every device in the house, with no one really paying attention to them. Many of the default settings are ‘as high def as possible’ and ‘stream until someone says stop’. In fairness to Netflix after a few episodes they’ll stop and prompt you to continue (still not good enough), but i’ve seen the kids switch off the TV they were streaming YouTube on and switched it on the next day to find that it’s still playing. On a switched off TV. Endlessly. And why take one or two high res pics of the kids when you can take 40 identical ones.
GADGET LOVERS
Who doesn’t love a new gadget! In particular, they’re aimed at people with disposable income, and marketed to make them feel they always need the new thing. Endless new gadgets create an even bigger environmental problem. Now on the one hand new gadgets tend to be more energy efficient in their day to day running. But they also usually throwing in a much more powerful camera and video function, bigger files, more processing power, taking up more server space. And then of course there’s the energy and resources needed to produce shiny new things. We weren’t looking into ‘e-waste’ but more gadgets, more waste, in every way. And all those rare earth materials sitting in drawers and shoe boxes because well, it’s just too much hassle to take all our data off our old gadgets and bring them to the recycling.
DIGITAL HOARDERS
Big tech has made it very easy for us to become lazy digital hoarders. Add an extra 10TB of ‘cloud’ storage for €2? Yeah, go on then. We can look at the old school hoarders navigating their newspaper stack corridors and 20 years of pizza boxes and think ‘how did it get to that?’ But digital files? Invisible! Out of sight, out of mind! In the digital world the truth is that most of us are hoarders. Emails, photos, whatsapps, google cloud, apple cloud, dropbox, all maxxed out. With stuff we don’t need and will never look at again. Folders stashed in folders stashed in folders of digital junk we just can’t bear to put in the bin.
SLACK TEAMS
People working in organisations often follow what others do without asking ‘why’ which can lead to huge digital waste issues, whether it’s endless zoom meetings, lazily sending and forwarding emails with huge attachments, or creating bloated presentations full of bad, unoptimised images (and then emailing the 100MB file to 60 people). Most businesses have a policy that all their employees should have the ‘please consider the environment before printing’ message at the end of their emails but have no real policies on their digital usage and storage.
CREATIVE HEAVYWEIGHTS
People working in design and content creation love to make things that look amazing and so create large amounts of digital waste: websites with bells and whistles and large images that don’t have any real purpose, creating content in resolutions that most people won’t benefit from, pushing unnecessary updates or saving huge working files to the cloud, just in case! Our mapping made it clear that we in the creative industries are right at the coalface of this challenge, even if that metaphor is a bit on the nose.
Making progress
These scenarios have helped us better understand the human side of the challenge, and helped inform our own decisions and work. They also formed the basis for a project that we’ve run for 3 years with students at Limerick School of Art and Design. Introducing them to the area, getting them to deepen their understanding of the challenges and to imagine interventions that would help start to raise awareness and shift people to better digital habits. And finally after 3 years of working behind the scenes to put digital sustainability at the heart of everything we do, we’re finalising some insights and resources which we’ll be publishing soon.
However we also need to share a final scenario. The one that we found was at the root of everything else. The systemic issue. While we can’t do anything directly to make changes on this one, we believe in people power. So while focusing efforts on the previous scenarios is only really treating the symptoms, the more people that are aware of these problems, the more chance there is of putting pressure on the source to make changes.
DATA DRACULAS
Many big tech business models are like a reverse mullet — party at the front, serious business at the back. The party — we’ve all come to enjoy a digital life that supposedly makes our real lives ‘easier’, more ‘connected’ and ‘convenient’. The business — many of the models are built on monetising the data we produce, and so they want more of it, more often, and in larger sizes. The scenarios we defined all stem from this. In fact they’re all driven by this. When they say data is the new oil, it really is, in terms of it being extracted, being valuable, and being really bad for the environment.
