Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change (2010)
Filed under report | Tags: · apple, climate crisis, cloud computing, ecology, facebook, google, microsoft, technology
Make IT Green shows how the launch of quintessential cloud computing devices like the Apple iPad, which offer users access to the “cloud” of online services like social networks and video streaming, can contribute to a much larger carbon footprint of the Information Technology (IT) sector than previously estimated.
To be clear: We are not picking on Apple. We are not dissing the iPad. But maybe someone can come up with an app that calculates the carbon footprint of using different web sites based on their location and energy deals. Apple is the master of promotion, and while we marvel at the sleek unpolluted design of the iPad, we need to think about where this is all leading and how like all good surfers we can make sure our environment stays clean and green.
Publisher Greenpeace International, Amsterdam, 30 March 2010
12 pages
PDF (updated on 2014-9-16)
Comment (0)Charlie Gere: Digital Culture. 2nd ed. (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · arpanet, counterculture, cybernetics, cyberpunk, digital culture, facebook, fluxus, neoliberalism, technology
From our bank accounts to supermarket checkouts to the movies we watch, strings of ones and zeroes suffuse our world. Digital technology has defined modern society in numerous ways, and the vibrant digital culture that has now resulted is the subject of Charlie Gere’s engaging volume.
In this revised and expanded second edition, taking account of new developments such as Facebook and the iPhone, Charlie Gere charts in detail the history of digital culture, as marked by responses to digital technology in art, music, design, film, literature and other areas. After tracing the historical development of digital culture, Gere argues that it is actually neither radically new nor technologically driven: digital culture has its roots in the eighteenth century and the digital mediascape we swim in today was originally inspired by informational needs arising from industrial capitalism, contemporary warfare and counter-cultural experimentation, among other social changes.
A timely and cutting-edge investigation of our contemporary social infrastructures, Digital Culture is essential reading for all those concerned about the ever-changing future of our Digital Age.
Edition 2
Publisher Reaktion Books, 2009
ISBN 1861893884, 9781861893888
240 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)
Comment (0)Naomi S. Baron: Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · blogging, electronic communication, facebook, instant messaging, internet, language, listening, mobile technology, multitasking, reading, writing
In Always On , Naomi S. Baron reveals that online and mobile technologies–including instant messaging, cell phones, multitasking, Facebook, blogs, and wikis–are profoundly influencing how we read and write, speak and listen, but not in the ways we might suppose. Baron draws on a decade of research to provide an eye-opening look at language in an online and mobile world. She reveals for instance that email, IM, and text messaging have had surprisingly little impact on student writing. Electronic media has magnified the laid-back “whatever” attitude toward formal writing that young people everywhere have embraced, but it is not a cause of it. A more troubling trend, according to Baron, is the myriad ways in which we block incoming IMs, camouflage ourselves on Facebook, and use ring tones or caller ID to screen incoming calls on our mobile phones. Our ability to decide who to talk to, she argues, is likely to be among the most lasting influences that information technology has upon the ways we communicate with one another. Moreover, as more and more people are “always on” one technology or another–whether communicating, working, or just surfing the web or playing games–we have to ask what kind of people we are becoming, as individuals and as family members or friends, if the relationships we form must increasingly compete for our attention with digital media.
* The first book to survey the field of electronically-mediated communication, position these technologies with respect to earlier language practices, and then evaluate the personal, cognitive, social, and linguistic consequences of contemporary language technologies.
* Analyzes of instant messaging conversations, multitasking, away messages, Facebook, and mobile phone usage by American college students draw upon original research by the author and her colleagues.
Publisher Oxford University Press US, 2008
ISBN 0195313054, 9780195313055
289 pages
PDF (updated on 2013-2-6)
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