DEEPTI’S RESEARCH DISPATCH
The Internet Needs to Go Green, Just Like Everything Else.
Digital Sustainability: Research Tidbit #3
It all started with the question of whether I wanted to blog every day, or to turn this ‘research dispatch’ category into a daily blog.
Several bloggers have given their takes on the pros and cons of daily blogging, mostly touching on creative benefits, SEO, and subscriber engagement, but none of them addressed my vague, undefined hesitation.
The idea of writing, potentially, another 22,000 blog posts in my lifetime (one a day for 60 years) raises my hair on end. I couldn’t tell you why, but the number seemed excessive, indecent, and wasteful.
Then, I realized that a part of me was wondering about the carbon footprint of that prodigious digital output. Going digital is generally regarded as an eco-friendly measure, and it definitely is, relative to print, if the consumption stays the same. But who prints and sends 22,000 newsletters?
This sounded like a case of the Jevons paradox, where a new technology decreases the energy needed per product, but demand increases so much that the net consumption stays the same, or even increases.
