Our thematic selections - Wednesday 09 February 2022

Digital sobriety

It's a phrase we're hearing more and more: what exactly is digital sobriety? Very recently, most of our activities went online during the exceptional circumstance of the Covid-19 pandemic. But this only accentuated a basic trend. Digital technology is now omnipresent in our lives: what are the risks of an excess? What is the basis for defining this excess? How do the consequences of digital use manifest themselves in different fields: economy, society, ecology?

Why do we associate the term "sobriety" with digital technology in particular? Are they two terms that cannot really be thought of without each other? 

Indeed, digital technology represents an enormous consumption of resources and a considerable emission of waste, including CO2, which contributes to global warming. But historically it has been presented, perhaps even thought as a process of dematerialization. In other words, a way to pursue economic growth while sparing natural resources. So much so that today, the term digital is often used in conjunction with the term ecological transition, as if it allowed the continuation of Business As Usual under new clothes. Why is this an illusion? Why does this illusion persist? 

As for the reflection on sobriety, or the decrease in our consumption of natural resources, it goes back at least to the first oil crisis of 1973, but it is perhaps as old as ecology as a feeling for nature and its preservation. It did not wait for the advent of digital technology to emerge.

So, are "sobriety" and "digital" two associated or antinomic terms? Is the expression "digital sobriety" the same kind of oxymoron as the expression "green growth"?

To make your own opinion on these decisive questions for the future of our societies, the K-lab offers you a selection of documents and key players on the issue, as well as two types of events:

• Capture of the Déjeuners Climatiques meeting of January 27, 2022 by videoconference (in French):

Fabrice Flipo, author of "L'impératif de la sobriété numérique" ("The Digital Sobriety Imperative"), published by Editions Matériologiques in 2020, talks about his research on the issue of the growing weight of digital technologies in our lives and on the environment. Much more than a simple means of communication, digital technology is present today in all the logistic chains of the world economy, while its production as well as its use are for a large part ecologically unsustainable. What choices could we make to significantly change this trajectory? 

• The K-lab workshop "Ecolo Geek: digital sobriety, what good practices" : Since 2019, the K-lab team regularly offers this workshop to raise awareness and question the Essec community (students, staff, participants in continuing education) on its uses of "digital"; the opportunity to review the key concepts, discuss best practices to free themselves from greenwashing. A one-hour workshop that mixes critical thinking and civic engagement by giving the keys to act.

If you wish to participate in this workshop, you have two options: 
- Follow the K-lab Workshops news and register for the next workshop
- Contact the K-lab to organize a session

Short selection of resources (in french) on digital sobriety, to be found at ESSEC's K-lab or freely available on the internet:

• On the global weight of digital:
  • Fabrice Flipo, L’impératif de la sobriété numérique : l’enjeu des modes de vie
  • Frédéric Bordage, Tendre vers la sobriété numérique : je passe à l'acte
  • EcoInfo du CNRS
• On mineral extractivism:
  • Bihouix Philippe, « Smart world vs « monde d’après » : quelle technologie pour demain ? », L'Économie politique, 2021/2 (N° 90), p. 48-61. 
  • Guillaume Pitron, “Quand le numérique détruit la planète”, le Monde diplomatique, octobre 2021
  • Guillaume Pitron, L'enfer numérique : voyage au bout d'un like, Les Liens qui libèrent, 2021
  • The association Systex, Rapport d'étude : Controverses minières, Volet 1, 16 novembre 2021 

If you are looking for tools to better master the issues related to digital sobriety, or even to take action, several initiatives and resources have caught our attention: 

• Participate in a playful and collaborative workshop with the digital collage. A recreational format that will allow you during 3 hours to exchange, discover and deconstruct some preconceived ideas on the subject.
• Self-training with MOOCs: 
  • Numérique Responsable. The INR (Institut du Numérique Responsable) offers you a complete course of 4h30 with a focus on the best practices to implement to reduce our digital impact. 
  • Impacts environnementaux du numérique, by INRIA (National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology): 5 hours to "learn to measure, decipher and act to find one's place as a citizen in a digital world".

  
Digital technology does not only have environmental consequences. It is also a determining factor in the evolution of our societies, with effects on the quality of our interpersonal relations at work and in the public space, as well as on our individual attention and concentration capacities.

Illustration :  Muntaka Chasant, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons