Download ICTs and Globalization: Asking Important Questions

ICTs and Globalization:
Asking Important Questions
•Internet and communications technologies
(ICTs)
• agile computing
• ubiquitous computing
•information society technologies
• information technologies
ICT
• The influence of ICTs has been dramatic, and
their future evolution is anticipated to
profoundly alter everyday life from the routine
and mundane to the novel and
unconventional.
• Some argue for and promote ICTs as the next
economic wave,with the potential to generate
jobs, wealth, and prosperity to surpass
ICT
• ICTs are focused on process, yet they also
stimulate the continuous innovation of
products.
• ICTs have the potential to improve energy and
materials
ICT
• ICTs may also bring democratic
opportunitiesto all corners of the world,
empowering the poor and disenfranchised
alike.
• the interactions of ICTs with social processes
ICT
• ICTs are an essential source of information and
communications.
• ICTs have the capacity to enable the
dispersion of information and
communications to every corner of the globe.
ICT
• those who develop and create ICTs have
become increasingly specialized
• In the context of its social embeddedness, what might be the ultimate
environmental and social implications of ICTs?
• Do ICTs have the potential to become the channel for increased
consumption, much as the preceding industrial era ushered in mass
consumption, and lifestyles and behavior based on the consumer as a
central actor in economic growth and globalization?
• Will ICTs dematerialize and immaterialize the human economy, permitting
continued growth and prosperity with less environmental damage and
with increased freedoms and social equality unseen in previous eras?
• What are the variables determining one trajectory over another?
• Can we control those variables to ensure more sustainable consumption?
• If so, where are the vital points for intervention?
• What happens to the vast quantities of electronic
wastes generated annually?
• Why does consumption demand continue to rise,
and can we afford this socially or environmentally?
• Will a rising tide, and the potential contribution of
ICTs, help enhance their well-being or merely widen
the divide?
• ICTs might enable more efficient growth,
creating the politically palatable perception of
win-win scenarios, offering hope to billions by
raising their standard of living and achieving a
more efficient consumption per gross
domestic product.
• When the tally was compiled, theeconomic
fallout cost an estimated
• $4 to $10 billion in U.S. dollars
• Gross domestic product (GDP) in Canada fell
0.7 percent in August2003
• 18.9 million work hours were lost
• Ontario manufacturing shipments were down
$2.3 billion in Canadian dollars
CONSUMPTION ACTIVITY
• Consumption activities, patterns, and levels of
material and energy throughput help define
who we are and increasingly both affect and
are affected by globalization
• These effects can in turn induce human
responses that alter the transborder
characteristics and velocity of globalization.
CONSUMPTION ACTIVITY
• .Everything we do, each activity we perform, is
associated with, often directly, the
consumption of energy and usually some form
of materials
• “Has this habituation been unconsciously
taken too far, and, if so, why?”
GLOBAL EFFECTS OF OUR
CONSUMPTION ACTIVITIES
• While we easily observe the effects of our
consumption activity at local and regional
scales, the global consequences are far more
difficult to perceive or confront
GLOBAL EFFECTS OF OUR
CONSUMPTION ACTIVITIES
• In the Arctic regions, areas already experiencing the greatest
impacts from climate changes, warming may thaw permafrost,
which may cause increased methane emissions and establish a
positive feedback cycle.
• The Inuit of northern Canada, for example, have had to cope with a
much later freeze in autumn and earlier thaw in spring.
• Many people in Latin America and Southeast Asia experience
effects from increasingly intense storms.
• Africans are coping with longer and more intense droughts, and,
like the Middle East, are fighting wars over declining resources such
as water.
GLOBAL CONSUMPTION ON A FINITE
PLANET
• In the early 1960s, humans were using about
70 per cent of nature’s output
• by the early 1980s, we’d reached 100 per cent
• and in 1999 we were at 125 per cent
SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION
• a reduced burden of producing, using, and
disposing of goods and services;
• satisfying basic needs for key consumption
goods and services, such as food, water, lifelong learning, sanitation, and shelter;
TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING
• Conventional development models have
sought to compensate for their own
shortcomings by attempting to incorporate
more people into the consumer economy, and
through economic growth