10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17497
Digital media and the environment pose some of the most urgent social issues of our time. Nonetheless, the relationship between them is often neglected and merely addressed in terms of impact. This scenario frames these topics in a chiastic relation, thus enquiring two processes: the digitization of ecology (both as a science and as a socio-political practice) and the ecologization of digital media (both in the sense of their greening and of their evolution into mediascapes). On one hand, by drawing on the Ecology of Information Infrastructures and the Actor-Network Theory approaches, environmental issues will be considered as a matter of digital communication and participation. On the other hand, the troubles of digital societies will be addressed from an environmental perspective, adopting the SCOT approach, and embracing the Media Ecology tradition to outline and call for digital sustainability strategies.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17497
1
en
Stefano Oricchio
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
mediascapes
Digitization of Ecology and Ecologization of Media. Going Beyond ICT Environmental Impact
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
12
Scenarios
2021-11-01
2023-06-27
2021-11-01
2023-10-19
99-116
TS
Stefano Oricchio
2021/11/01
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17497
99
University of Calabria
2038-3460
1
mediascapes
en
116
Digitization of Ecology and Ecologization of Media. Going Beyond ICT Environmental Impact
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17497/16342
12
                                                                          Scenario

Digitization of Ecology and
Ecologization of Media
Going Beyond ICT Environmental Impact

Stefano Oricchio
Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Calabria



     Abstract: Digital media and the environment pose some of the most ur-
     gent social issues of our time. Nonetheless, the relationship between them
     is often neglected and merely addressed in terms of impact. This scenario
     frames these topics in a chiastic relation, thus enquiring two processes: the
     digitization of ecology (both as a science and as a socio-political practice)
     and the ecologization of digital media (both in the sense of their greening
     and of their evolution into mediascapes). On one hand, by drawing on the
     Ecology of Information Infrastructures and the Actor-Network Theory ap-
     proaches, environmental issues will be considered as a matter of digital
     communication and participation. On the other hand, the troubles of digital
     societies will be addressed from an environmental perspective, adopting
     the SCOT approach, and embracing the Media Ecology tradition to outline
     and call for digital sustainability strategies.

     Keywords: digital media, ecology, environmental informatics, demateriali-
     zation, green IT, mediascapes

     Submitted: June 19, 2020 – Accepted: February 26, 2021

     Corresponding author: Stefano Oricchio, Department of Political and
     Social Sciences, University of Calabria, Via Pietro Bucci, 87036 Arcavacata
     di Rende (CS). E-mail: stefano.oricchio@unical.it




1. Looking Beyond Impact

    For at least fifteen years, issues concerning either the environment or
digital technologies have been prevailing in the public debate. On a daily
basis, news, reports, political statements, and many other kinds of infor-
mation instruct us about risks and opportunities deriving from our eco-
logical or digital behaviours. A small example displaying the extent of this
process is that among the 23 words of the year chosen by the Oxford

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
12 (1) pp. 99-116 – ISSN 2038-3460                   2021
www.tecnoscienza.net
100                                                              Tecnoscienza – 12 (1)

English Dictionary between 2004 and 2019, five of them related to digital
media and four to the environment (Oxford English Dictionary 2020).
Despite the wide attention directed to ecology and digitization as single
issues, the public as well as mainstream media seem much less interested
in their possible relationships. On top of that, when a relation is built,
most of the times it addresses information and communication technolo-
gies’ (ICTs) environmental impact in quantitative terms.1 The aim of the
following pages is precisely to overcome such an approach through Sci-
ence and Technology Studies (STS), providing an alternative perspective
on it and, most importantly, identifying other possible connections be-
tween digital media and the environment.
     Thus, two processes will be inquired: the digitization of ecology (both
as a science and as a socio-political practice) and the ecologization of digi-
tal media (both in the sense of their greening and of their evolution in
terms of informational environments). At a first glance, this reversal
might appear as a mere exercise in style but crossing words in a chiastic
relation might provide useful insights: this paper invites to consider envi-
ronmental issues as a matter of digital communication and, conversely, to
interpret digital society’s troubles from an ecological point of view. These
tasks require a multidisciplinary gaze that, drawing on different theoreti-
cal perspectives, spans from sociology of science to environmental sociol-
ogy and media studies.
     In particular, digitization of ecology addresses how digital technolo-
gies affect both the production of environmental knowledge and the par-
ticipation into ecological issues. As such, digital ecology first implies a so-
ciology of science tailored on the community of environmental scientists
and on their research work. Here the ecology of information infrastruc-
tures (henceforth: EII), and particularly Susan Leigh Star’s work, repre-
sents a sound perspective to adopt. By inquiring the production of scien-
tific knowledge through a relational lens that highlights the tension be-
tween universalistic vocations and situated practices, EII allows to see
digital technologies as a crucial but unstable information infrastructure
for environmental scientists, whose analysis can shed light on the current
environmental debate. Secondly, digital ecology also pertains to environ-
mental sociology and media studies, as it calls into question issues con-


    1
      Emerging as a field of research in the 1990s, ICTs’ environmental assessment
represents the earliest and most common approach to the relationship between
digital technologies and the environment. Providing a balance of direct effects in
terms of energy use, resources consumption and waste production, ICTs’
ecological impact is a technical and multidisciplinary subject, traditionally
embraced by “hard” sciences such as industrial ecology, energy engineering, and
informatics. Social sciences have sometimes contributed to this field by adopting a
quantitative approach to evaluate ICTs’ indirect effects. Inquiries into other kinds
of relation between ICTs and the environment have been only marginal (Mol
2008, 10-16).
Oricchio                                                                 101
cerning environmental information and participation. Recurring to in-
sights from Bruno Latour’s and Noortje Marres’ work in the frame of Ac-
tor-Network Theory (ANT), digital media can be seen as a broad array of
hybrid and socio-technical networks, in which human and non-human
actants interact according to different logics with different implications.
Together, EII and ANT can help to understand the role of digital tech-
nologies in producing environmental knowledge as well as in facing the
environmental crisis.
    The ecologization of digital media pertains to two further and distinct
processes inherent to media studies. First, it refers to the influence of en-
vironmental concerns towards the evolution of digital devices and infra-
structures, whose greening, i.e., the mitigation of their own environmental
impact, has been occurring through several socio-technical innovations.
Following the tradition of Social Construction of Technology (SCOT),
this process emerges as a battleground in which different social groups
struggle to affirm their technological framework through different prac-
tices and values. Finally, to speak of ecological digital media also means
looking at their evolution in terms of mediascapes, i.e., informational en-
vironments installed into the physical space. In this sense, the Media
Ecology (henceforth: ME) tradition represents a crucial tool for under-
standing this process, the digital issues it raises and some possible solu-
tions. Addressing green/ecological media through SCOT and ME will al-
low to understand whether and how environmental concerns affect the
development and use of digital ICTs.
    Digital ecology and ecological media thus represent two wide and
challenging subjects, which often overlap rising possible misunderstand-
ings. For this reason, the next section specifies the meaning assigned to
key terms like “ecology” and “digital media”. The following four para-
graphs address the issues of digital ecology and ecological media by re-
flecting on selected literature revolving around EII, ANT, SCOT and
ME, and by putting forward some thought-provoking arguments. Finally,
the conclusive section summarizes the key points of this scenario.


2. Ecologies and Digital Media
    When talking of ecology, we will refer both to the namesake scientific
discipline and to those socio-political practices often labelled as environ-
mentalism. While being aware of the many differences occurring between
them, it is important to remind that a radical distinction is not adequate,
given how complex, heterogeneous, and intertwined these two domains
are. Environmentalism acts as an umbrella term for many different things
such as, among others, nature conservation, the rise of green political par-
ties, environmental information, communication, education, and activism
(Nebbia 1999). Furthermore, all these activities derive from scientific
ecology, a multidisciplinary field whose epistemological status, classifica-
102                                                        Tecnoscienza – 12 (1)

tion, and affiliation are controversial, having often changed over time ac-
cordingly to the dominant paradigms and to the scale of observed events
(Bellamy Foster and Clark 2008). Spanning from the atom to the eco-
sphere (Odrum and Barrett 1971, 4-7), ecology appeals to physics, chem-
istry, biology, geology, climatology, and many other natural sciences. In
addition, it has several concrete applications in the fields of engineering
and industrial production. Being a domain in which modern separations
show up with all their artificiality (Latour 2012), we will use the term
“ecology” in an inclusive way, referring to diverse environmental sciences
and to the several social practices they inform.
    As a hybrid science whose main subject are relations, ecology has also
inspired many approaches to social reality, including EII and ME. Neil
Postman (1970, 161) defined the latter as “the study of media as envi-
ronments”, urging to deepen into “the interaction between people and
their communications technology” to understand how these “affect hu-
man perception, understanding, feeling and value”. Thanks to the “pow-
erful metaphors of media as ecologies and environments” and to “its fo-
cus on the materiality of technological artefacts” (Trerè 2019, 44) ME is a
valuable tool to inquire the ecologization of digital media as mediascapes.
On its turn, EII goes beyond media to bring human agency into play and
to “include the network of relationships, values, and motivations involved
in technology use” (Trerè 2019, 41). In their seminal work, Star and
Ruhleder (1996, 117) clarify that “the term ecology (…) refers to the deli-
cate balance of language and practice across communities and parts of
organizations; it draws attention to that balance (or lack of it). It is not
meant to imply either a biological approach or a closed, functional sys-
temic one”. To avoid possible misunderstandings, it is important to re-
mark that the word “ecology”, both in ME and in EII, is a matter of
method, rather than content.
    While referring to ecology in a broad and metaphorical way, our anal-
ysis needs to narrow the category of digital media both in meaning and in
time. On a conceptual level, we exclude digital codes, as these comprise
all communication systems made of discrete units, including, for instance,
the human language. Rather, we identify digital media with those devices
and infrastructures that allow information processing through electricity
(Granata 2009, 107-108). Still, we further need to narrow the temporal
field. Starting from electricity’s informatization, in fact, would imply to
consider technologies such as the telegraph, the radio, the television, and
electronic calculators, whose relationships with ecology are out of our
scope. Rather, we trace a meaningful turning point for digital media his-
tory back to 1969, when packet switching was successfully tested to send
a message across the ARPANET, the first computer network. That exper-
iment marked a symbolic watershed, starting a qualitative change hardly
spottable at any other time in the evolution of digital devices, which could
now exchange resources between them and increase their computational
power through the network. Somehow, they started talking to each other,
Oricchio                                                                  103
and not just to humans. When discussing digital media, the paper will
thus refer to digital connectivity’s devices and infrastructures, calling into
question mainframe and personal computers, laptops, smartphones, as
well as early computer networks, software, the Internet, the World Wide
Web, and mobile apps.


3. Digitizing Ecology

3.1 Environmental informatics as unsteady information
infrastructure

     It is common belief that scientific knowledge benefits from digital
technologies, as these allow accurate measurements, faster field detec-
tions, complex data processing and a better communication within the
scientific community. Environmental scientists embraced this view from
the beginning, extensively drawing upon computer applications for envi-
ronmental monitoring and control. The application of information sys-
tems to ecology dates back at least to 1975, when the first text in the field
was published under the title Computer Techniques in Environmental
Science (Ouellette et al. 1975). Today, the marriage between ecology and
digital media is solid as ever, being structured in a specific discipline
called Environmental Informatics (Hilty 2014). Nevertheless, from the
ecological perspective of information infrastructure, the relationship be-
tween science, including ecology, and technology seems much less taken
for granted and much more problematic. In particular, if we consider that
“an infrastructure occurs when the tension between local and global is re-
solved” (Star and Ruhleder 1996, 114), one can argue that environmental
informatics have never been a stable information infrastructure, given
that such a tension continues to persist.
     This is particularly evident in climate studies where, despite an ever-
increasing amount of information has been digitally processed, consensus
still lacks, making the climate change debate a political issue of global rel-
evance and an ongoing scientific controversy. As a science enquiring a
global phenomenon, climatology’s development is strictly connected to
digital networks. Not by chance, it has been among the first fields in
ecology to exploit computer networking from the very beginning. Global
climate dynamics simulation and modelling, and air pollution risks are the
only environmental projects listed in the ARPAnet resources handbook, a
directory of research institutions connected through the ARPAnet
(Feinler 1978, 297; 312; 565). The relationship between climatology and
informatics is thoroughly investigated in Paul Edwards’ book A Vast Ma-
chine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global
Warming (2010). Here the author retraces the whole story of global cli-
mate knowledge, showing that digital media helped in making global data
104                                                         Tecnoscienza – 12 (1)

(Edwards 2010, 187-227) but at the same time posed difficulties in mak-
ing data global (Edwards 2010, 251-285). This means that while digital
technologies lessened data friction (i.e., the process of gathering data col-
lected in different times and locations), they also enhanced metadata fric-
tion (i.e., the inconsistency of those data’s original, local context). Such
enhancement is not depending on digital technology in itself; it is rather
the consequence of how scientists conduct their work through it. Re-
searchers always omit some metadata, for either technical limits or negli-
gence, causing metadata friction to other scholars. Retaining the context,
moreover, is a sensitive issue concerning every discipline, including other
environmental sciences (see, for zoology: Star and Griesemer 1989; for
biodiversity: Bowker 2000; for taxonomy and genetics: Waterton et al.
2013). Nonetheless, by connecting very different contexts across the
world, digital media have highlighted the inconsistency of situated scien-
tific practices. At the same time, however, the scientific community envi-
sioned a possible solution in the same digital technologies.
     To reduce heterogeneity and to adjust metadata for making them
global, as Edwards (2010, 188) puts forth, “scientists developed suites of
intermediate computer models that converted heterogeneous, irregularly
spaced instrument readings into complete, consistent, gridded global data
sets”. Computer-aided data models “are really a vast family of mathemat-
ical techniques, algorithms, and empirically derived adjustments to in-
strument readings” (Edwards 2010, xv). Recalling Bowker and Star
(1999), Edwards names these continuous efforts to recover original
metadata and to build comprehensive datasets as infrastructural inver-
sion. This is “a long and painful process [that] began in 1970s [and
through which] climate scientists turned the climate record upside down,
reexamining every element of the observing system’s history, often down
to the level of individual measurements” (Edwards 2010, xvi). Nonethe-
less, infrastructural inversion through data models poses the same prob-
lem again, but on another level. Different scientists and laboratories al-
ways create different data models, starting some kind of “data wars: ra-
ther than one definitive global dataset, multiple, competing data sets will
emerge” (Edwards 2010, 435; see also: 287-322). In short, digital technol-
ogies allow gathering larger volume of data, but they cannot guarantee
the consistency of their original contexts: on the contrary, they highlight
incoherence. Moreover, when used to recover the context or to correct
previous detections, digital technologies fuel further debates because they
allow multiple ways to do that.
     This is exactly where the widest and most urgent environmental issue
of our time is stuck. Climate change supporters and deniers are such ac-
cording to the (meta)data they collect and elaborate, a process that in-
creasingly happens through digital media. Of course, economic and polit-
ical interests play a major role in this debate, benefiting from the lack of
consensus. Nonetheless, the crucial point is that the two factions support
their thesis through some kind of digital data: somehow, climate change is
Oricchio                                                                 105
a digital issue. The same applies for other ecological controversies, as
those connected to pollution, contamination and toxicity issues in which
risk thresholds are heavily debated.
    Environmental informatics is thus an unstable infrastructure, which
has not yet stabilized, and which is still in inversion. Environmental scien-
tist should take it less for granted, focusing much more on its situated
use. Following Bowker and Edwards’ suggestions, they should increasing-
ly cooperate with social scientists and with each other by building strong-
er international institutions and information infrastructures. For climatol-
ogy, the institution of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) in 1988 is a first step in this direction but, given the ongoing and
multiple controversies, there is still a long way to go.

3.2 Non-human agency between material participation and
dematerialization

    Besides environmental sciences, digital media play an increasingly rel-
evant role into environmentalism, as they evolved from mere information-
al tools to complex participatory systems. While media studies allow to
identify the most important stages of this process, to integrate environ-
mental sociology with the ANT attention towards non-human agents
sheds light on its implication, both in terms of participation and effec-
tiveness.
    Before the 2000s, digital media have had a limited impact on envi-
ronmental information and communication. Until the end of the 1980s, in
fact, computer networks mainly concerned tech companies, armies, and
the scientific community, with the public having little or no interest in
them. Even with the advent of the World Wide Web and with the in-
creasing accessibility of home computers and connections during the
1990s, the information retrieval still reflected a top-down structure and
followed a “navigational” path, being filtered by search engines and lim-
ited at few institutional websites (Rose and Levinson 2004). Accordingly,
digital media acted similarly to traditional media, providing people with
generic environmental news.2
    A more relevant shift towards digital ecology happened around 2004,
with the development of the so-called web 2.0, a renewed Internet archi-
tecture that encouraged and simplified user-generated content. As blogs,
wikis, and social networks did not require any advanced computer skills,
many more people could now upload their own resources and share it
among peers and strangers, turning the information structure into a bot-
tom-up model featured by co-creation, dialogue and prosuming dynam-
ics. For ecology, this opened a myriad of possibilities, gradually turning


   2
     Traditional media, however, have had a profound influence in setting the
environmental agenda (see Anderson 1997).
106                                                         Tecnoscienza – 12 (1)

digital media from informational devices into participatory tools (see Mol
2008; Anderson 2014). Online forums or social media groups, for in-
stance, allowed setting up protests or exchanging “sustainable life hacks”
within the environmentalist communities. As the ANT scholar and politi-
cal theorist Noortje Marres (2012, 74-77) points out, this kind of infor-
mation are calls to environmental action that materialize participation ac-
cording to the pragmatist motto “the more invested, the more engaged”.
From an environmental point of view, this particular use of digital media
aims at co-articulating the “the amplification of costs, efforts, disruptions,
as a way of documenting the ‘costs’ of environmental change” (Marres
2012, 77). Nonetheless, digital ecology and material participation also re-
spond to different and more problematic co-articulations. In the field of
nature conservation, for example, many NGOs and environmental insti-
tutions extensively exploited social media to enhance their projects (see
Arts et al. 2015) by stimulating users’ online engagement in order to col-
lect more data through crowdsourcing and citizen science or to raise
more funds through crowdfunding. Turning online engagement into of-
fline activities with concrete implications on the physical environment,
however, might lead to a “nature 2.0” (Büscher 2016) which suffers of
spectacularization, subjection to neoliberal policies and slacktivism. The
latter, in particular, represents a problematic and often useless or even
harmful kind of participation, which responds to the liberal logics of the
“minimization of the effort” and of the “involvement-made-easy” (Marres
2012, 65-71).
    Yet, digital media materialized environmental participation in even
more profound and paradoxical ways that sink their roots back to the
emergence of the Internet imaginary (Flichy 2007). During the 1990s, a
wide use of metaphors featured the public and political debate about dig-
ital media, depicting the Internet as a ‘digital library’, a ‘cyberspace’, or
‘information highways’ (Stefik 1996; Bory 2020). Besides feeding high ex-
pectations in terms of democracy, knowledge and wealth, the “digital
sublime” (Mosco 2004) also caught the environmentalists’ attention. Sev-
eral scholars, companies, politicians and institutions explicitly juxtaposed
environmental sustainability, which emerged as a public discourse in
those same years, with the opportunities deriving from the Internet in
terms of dematerialization (Camorrino 2018). Still today, emails, e-
commerce and smart working, to cite just a few digital applications, are
often promoted as effective tools for lowering energy and resources con-
sumption. At the end of the 2000s, sharing economy platforms such as
Blablacar (2006), Airbnb (2007) and Uber (2009) took a further step to-
wards material participation. Mediating between supply and demand of
underused assets through their websites or mobile apps, these companies
often magnified the supposed environmental benefits deriving from using
their services. An extensive literature, however, proved that all these as-
sumptions were too optimistic, finding out that digital ICTs entail direct,
indirect, and systemic rebound effects offsetting their supposed benefits
Oricchio                                                                107
(Plepys 2002; Gossart 2015).
    From an ANT perspective, digital ecology seems to represent an en-
couraging trend towards environmental sustainability. Acknowledging
technology as a moral tool (Verbeek 2011) with an (ecological) agency of
its own, digitization of ecology seems to hold Latour’s call to “turn our
exclusive attention away from humans and look also at nonhumans (…)
the hidden and despised social masses who make up our morality”
(Latour 1992, 227). Envisaging strong allies in non-human actants such as
digital devices, systems and infrastructure, digital ecology might over-
come the artificial dichotomy between culture and nature that features
both ecological modernization and deep ecology. Nonetheless, digital
ecology cannot rely on technology alone. Rather, to succeed in its ecologi-
cal purpose and to avoid techno-solutionism, it needs to be part of a
stronger actor-network, made up of both humans and natural non-
humans. Emails and electronic documents alone cannot reduce paper us-
age if workers are not educated to their proper use; e-commerce or smart
working alone cannot reduce air pollution if deforestation does not slow
down drastically; and home sharing platforms alone cannot lessen re-
source waste if they gentrify entire cities. While dematerialization and
slacktivism often present themselves as self-sufficient strategies, online
environmental communities exploit interconnections and alliances, by
connecting people each other, funding associations’ projects, educating
about biodiversity or sustainable living. These few examples help to point
out that digital ecology, to be effectively sustainable and not to fail,
should recruit as many allies as possible and build its own context
(Latour 1996, 133-134), co-articulating environmental participation in
broader terms, rather than limiting it to the technological register.


4. Ecologizing Digital Media

4.1 Greening strategies, from green it to green web

    So far, by talking of digital ecology, we addressed environmental is-
sues as a matter of digital technologies, with the latter affecting both our
knowledge of the environment and attitudes towards it. We now attempt
to reverse the relationship, enquiring whether and how environmental
concerns (could) shape digital media’s development and use. The reversal
might seem abrupt, but the idea of dematerialization we have just gone
through is a good case in point.
    Besides presenting digitization as a self-sufficient and environmentally
sound strategy, the dematerialization myth conceals the multiplication of
devices it implies and their materiality. Even if all previous media indus-
tries have had profound ecological costs (see Maxwell and Miller 2012,
42-64), none of them embodied the “materiality paradox” (Schor and
108                                                         Tecnoscienza – 12 (1)

White 2010, 40-41) as much as the digital one. As Balbi and Magaudda
(2018, 8) point out, “contrary to the argument of dematerialization, digit-
ization has encompassed an explosion of new hardware dedicated to re-
producing and storing contents: from computers to telephones, DVDs to
USB sticks, MP3 readers to cameras, to cite just a few. (…) The digitiza-
tion process has actually stimulated the dissemination of material devic-
es”. The production, use, and disposal of digital artefacts and infrastruc-
ture involve an intensive use of energy and harmful resources, whose eco-
logical impact is controversial but definitely growing. In 2007, ICTs were
estimated to be responsible for 1% of global greenhouses gas emissions;
in 2018, the value increased to 3.6% with it being projected to grow to
14% by 2040; of these emissions, devices currently account for the 31%,
and infrastructures (data centres and communication networks) for the
remaining 69% (Belkhir and Elmeligi 2018). If the IT sector was a coun-
try, it would rank third globally for electricity consumption (Cook 2017).
Also, electronic waste is ever increasing: while in 2014 it amounted to
44.4 million tons, in 2019 it grew up to 53.6. Moreover, its vast majority
(82.6%) is not documented and is being dumped improperly or even ille-
gally in developing countries (Forti et al. 2020), causing enormous dam-
ages to the population and to the environment. Such ecological costs col-
lide with the possibilities implied in dematerialization. As Luciano Floridi
points out: “the overall result is that we are taking a technological gambit:
we are counting on the fact that ICTs benefit the environment more sig-
nificantly and quickly than they actually harm it, and that there is enough
time for such a gambit to pay back” (Floridi 2014, 213). However, be-
sides its assessment and quantification, ICTs’ environmental impact ac-
quires a more specific sociological relevance when observing how it af-
fected the evolution of digital artefacts. In particular, from a SCOT per-
spective, digital media greening seems to reflect an interpretative flexibil-
ity involving different actors, strategies and values (Bijker et al. 1987).
     While the public has been unaware of it for a long time, ICTs’ envi-
ronmental impact is a concrete and long-standing issue for producers and
political institutions. Tech companies, in particular, have always been
sensitive towards energy efficiency, as it goes hand in hand with devices’
miniaturization and simultaneous increase in computational power. This
process, which famously aroused the interest of Intel’s co-founder Gor-
don Moore already in 1965, was fraught of economic opportunities and
paved the way to the personal computers industry, disclosing an extreme-
ly valuable market. In 1992, computers energy efficiency became a subject
for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency program Energy Star.
Launching its label to promote and certify hardware’s energy perfor-
mances, the EPA stimulated the emergence of an entire R&D sector, the
so-called Green IT or green computing, which would have soon devel-
oped software solutions like screensavers and stand-by modes. In 2002,
two European directives concerning hazardous substances and e-waste
(2002/95/EC; 2002/96/EC) put another building block for digital media’s
Oricchio                                                                109
greening. By restricting the use of lead, mercury, cadmium, and other
chemicals, and by introducing producers’ responsibility for devices dis-
posal, these measures stimulated eco-design innovations and facilitated
practices such as computers refurbishing and recycling. Today, given
their overwhelming carbon emissions, greening data centres represents
the most crucial challenge for the so-called Green Web. As most players
in the big tech industry are pledging to become carbon neutral within a
decade (The Guardian 2020a; The Guardian 2020b), they are increasingly
powering server farms with renewable energy and displacing them in re-
mote locations or even beneath the sea to favour their natural cooling
(Microsoft 2020).
    Introducing energy and toxicity issues into computer engineering
from the early 1990s, ecology has been affecting for at least thirty years
the production of digital devices and infrastructures whose current tech-
nical shape and organization, somehow, incorporate environmentally
sound solutions. Digital media’s greening, however, is not yet a closed
and stabilized process, as it is also following some divergent paths. Social
practices like those encompassed by repair cafes, swapping communities,
or the open source movement’s aim at extending devices’ life cycle and at
resisting planned obsolescence through software and hardware manipula-
tion (Jackson 2014). While Green IT combines ecology and linear econ-
omy, these social practices embrace very different values, supporting in-
formal and circular economies and posing an obstacle to digital media’s
traditional market. Still from a SCOT perspective, hackers, activists, and
hobbyists seem relevant social groups struggling for their own interpreta-
tion of digital devices and technological framework (Bijker et al. 1987). In
this sense, the development of modular design for laptops and
smartphones reflects an interpretative flexibility that might lead toward a
more radical eco-design of digital media, taking into account not only
their technical properties but also the social practices they can encom-
pass. Looking at infrastructures, a particularly meaningful example of so-
cial greening is represented by Ecosia, a web search engine that, from
December 2009 to October 2020, has planted more than one hundred
million trees all over the world thanks to its users’ online searches. As a
social business whose mission is to build a greener Internet, Ecosia de-
volves part of its advertising revenues to offset its emissions through re-
forestation projects. The company states to be more than “carbon neu-
tral” and that its website “actively remove[s] CO2 from the air” thus mit-
igating the effects of climate change (Ecosia 2019). Stating whether this is
true or not would be a pointless operation, given how complex, hypothet-
ical, and arbitrary environmental assessments are. Rather, recalling ANT
and the previous section, what is mostly interesting about Ecosia is that it
pursues digital media’s greening by building on a network made of indi-
viduals, companies, advertisers, associations, digital infrastructures, de-
vices, and natural entities such as trees.
110                                                        Tecnoscienza – 12 (1)

4.2 Mediascapes and the need for a digital sustainability

    As a polysemic expression, the ecologization of digital media also per-
tains to another, very different and twofold process, i.e., their increasing
presence into the physical space and their simultaneous development into
informational environments. While the previous section looked at green
media through the lenses of SCOT, the focus is now on mediascapes
(Appadurai 1990; Casetti 2018) or also ecomedia (Parisi 2019, 37-46),
meant as both hypermediated environments and environmental media. Il-
lustrating these concepts and their implications through Media Ecology,
digital sustainability could be suggested as a convenient strategy to coun-
ter digital pollution, both in its environmental and communicative mean-
ing.
    All media – whether they are old or new, analogical or digital – exist
as material artefacts that act upon a physical space, transforming it and
giving it a temporary or permanent identity. Writing, for example, made
archives possible; the printing press gave shape to modern libraries; Lu-
mières’ cinematographe brought cinema rooms and, later on, drive-ins;
billboards continuously change the urban landscape, and television deep-
ly affected the domestic space. Thus, when a medium, or a set of media,
defines the essence and the practices of a place – be it a phone box, a
game room, or a whole city – we then have a mediascape (Casetti 2018,
118). What is peculiar about digital media is that by enhancing the pro-
cess of multi-media convergence (Jenkins 2006), they allowed traditional
media to migrate into digital devices, giving life to new and hybrid medi-
ascapes. Today, for instance, one can watch a movie in a cinema room as
well as at home or on a bench in the street; similarly, one can purchase a
music album in a specific store or while eating in a restaurant. The list of
examples might be endless. As Casetti (2018, 131, my translation) points
out, “even if technologies seem to become rapidly obsolescent, media, to-
day, tend not to die: rather, they relocate. (…) Moving, a medium create a
new kind of situation which generates a new mediascape”. Over the last
decade, because of a huge increase in mobile connectivity and digitized
mobilities (Urry 2007), digital technologies filled the environment with
informational flows, creating new spaces and reconfiguring old ones. In
this sense, digital technologies are deeply ecological.
    Even more important, however, is that digital technologies, thanks to
multimedia convergence and connectivity, act as a gate to mediated envi-
ronments, thus becoming virtual environments themselves. Media as en-
vironments, referring once again to Postman’s powerful words, seems to
be no longer a mere metaphor. Digital media’s development in terms of
informational environments is attested by the words we use when talking
of them: platforms, resources, surfing, web, browser, explorer, windows,
cloud, drive are just few examples explicitly recalling natural elements or
spaces of action. Also, use of digital technologies is ever increasing: in
2019, the average global time spent per day on the Internet was 6 hours
Oricchio                                                                  111
and 42 minutes (We are social 2020). The reason why we spend more
time on digital media than in real places like theatres, stores, parks, or
museums is, at least in part, that through the same technology we can ac-
cess to increasingly accurate representations of those places. Digital me-
dia are deeply ecological in this sense too. Such an intensive use requires
to draw data from the Internet, but also to put a huge volume in. Depict-
ing the extent of datafication, Floridi (2014, 13) reports that humanity
had accumulated approximately 12 exabytes of data in the course of its
entire history until the commodification of computers, but (…) it had al-
ready reached 180 exabytes by 2006. (…) The total grew to over 1600 ex-
abytes between 2006 and 2011, thus passing the zettabyte (1000 exabytes)
barrier. This figure is now expected to grow fourfold approximately every
three years, so that we shall have 8 zettabytes of data by 2015.
    These forecasts were extremely reductive. In 2018 alone, the world
produced 33 zettabytes of data, with an expectation of growth up to 175
ZB in 2025 (Reinsel et al. 2018, 6). Collecting, storing and accessing this
information, of which the overwhelming majority is redundant, has huge
ecological costs, as illustrated in the previous section. Nonetheless, it also
has social costs: data breaches, mass surveillance, online frauds, hate
speech, illegal content, and viral fake news, to cite just a few critical ex-
amples, are a kind of communicative and symbolic pollution (Floridi
2020, 71-77) that depends on datafication and, at the same time, contrib-
utes to it. These issues are often addressed in technical or institutional
terms, assuming digital media as mere instruments and asserting that it
would be enough to improve cyber-security, to design new privacy poli-
cies or to develop better algorithms. From a ME perspective, instead, it
seems more and more necessary to develop a digital sustainability strategy
as strong and binding as the environmental one, but hopefully more effec-
tive. Increasingly fulfilling and representing the environment, digital me-
dia can no longer be considered as mere tools. Rather, we should
acknowledge, protect and safeguard them as real environments, limiting
the amount of resources to withdraw and to spill over them. This sort of
digital e-nvironmentalism (Floridi 2014, 217-220) could take more or less
complex forms. It might result, for example, in a digital transnational
governance to take digital infrastructures away from private interest, or it
could counter irresponsible feeding of algorithms through financial disin-
centives. Also, digital education programs could contribute, explaining
that a clear and neat demarcation between online and offline is no longer
possible (Boccia Artieri et al. 2017), and that we rather live an “onlife”
experience taking place into an “infosphere” (Floridi 2014, 25-86) in
which every action has consequences on the real environment. Educating
and struggling for a digital sustainability strategy that, by involving indi-
viduals, institutions, companies, devices, and natural entities, could finally
consider virtual environments just like real and concrete environments is
a crucial challenge for the next years. Ecologizing digital media, in this
sense, is not an accomplished process but a goal to pursue.
112                                                         Tecnoscienza – 12 (1)

5. Conclusions
    By adopting an STS-oriented approach, the relationships between dig-
ital media and the environment show up in all their complexity, going far
beyond the impact issue. Digital ecology and ecological media emerge as
crucial concepts that shed light on both the ecological crisis and the ex-
cesses of digitally mediated societies.
    Digitization of ecology reconfigured our knowledge of the environ-
ment but at the same time raised new epistemological and political chal-
lenges. Environmental sciences benefited from digital media in terms of
data collection but not in terms of coherence, feeding lasting controver-
sies. Digital ecology also provided us with great opportunities and tools to
live more sustainably and to take part into the ecological crisis. Participa-
tion, though, should not be restricted to the technological register. Ra-
ther, recruiting human, technological and natural actors, digital ecology
could avoid some of its most common side effects. Among these, the en-
vironmental impact of digital devices and infrastructures represents an
impelling issue.
    ICTs’ huge ecological costs allows to reverse the relationship and to
enquire whether and how ecological concerns affected digital media’s de-
velopment and use. On one side, the ecologization of media is an ongoing
process, given that several socio-technical innovations are in place to
green digital technologies, affecting their evolution each in a different
way. On the other side, though, ecologizing digital media is a goal to pur-
sue. Even if digital technologies increasingly present themselves as medi-
ascapes affecting our lives, it seems that our society is still reluctant in
considering them likewise natural environments. A digital sustainability
strategy inspired by the environmental one could limit the excessive re-
source drawing and spilling over, thus reducing digital technologies’ envi-
ronmental costs as well as the growing threats they pose to individual and
social life.


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