Platforms and the Planet
Big Tech, Digital Platforms and Environmental Responsibility
This book can be opened with
Note on our eBooks and Audiobooks: you can read our eBooks (ePUB or PDF) and listen to audiobooks on the free Emerald Books app on iOS, Android, and desktop. Or read and listen on Emerald's online reader (ePUB eBooks and audiobooks only). To purchase a digital book you will need to create an account if you don’t already have one. After purchasing you will receive instructions on how to get started.
- Description
- Contents
- About
There is a growing public and scholarly attention to the environmental footprint of digital technologies, and to the climate responsibility of technology corporations and social media platforms specifically. Developing a critical understanding of the environmental responsibility and accountability of digital platforms, Platforms and the Planet focuses on the environmental responsibility of the so-called Big Tech, their digital media platforms and their role in the sustainability transition as a discursive, material, and ethical question.
Written from a much-needed critical and cross-disciplinary perspective, challenging the prevailing perspective on digital platforms as “green” and non-material entities, the chapters unpack their non-sustainable, material essence. Bridging critical platform studies with environmental studies and environmental communication studies, the chapters explore three broad themes. First, the chapters unpack what environmental sustainability means in relation to platforms. The second theme scrutinises the material and infrastructural dimensions of the digital platform society from the perspective of sustainability and global justice. Third, the chapters dive into the discourses of accountability by both digital platforms and actors criticizing them.
This edited collection is compelling reading for a wide range of researchers and students both in the fields of media and communication studies, digital sociology, and other fields of critical technology studies and environmental studies. The book will also be useful for those interested in global platform companies from the perspective of management and organization studies or more broadly as societal actors.
Introduction: Conceptualising and Theorising the Environmental Responsibility of Digital Platforms; Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, Mervi Pantti, and Olga Dovbysh
- Section 1. Unpacking Environmental Sustainability
- Chapter 1. The Eco-Materiality of Digital Platforms; Martina Skrubbeltrang Mahnke
- Chapter 2. The Challenging Task of Estimating the Carbon Footprint of Digital Services; Salla-Maaria Laaksonen and Gopika Premsankar
- Chapter 3. Understanding Moral Lapses in Design: Cultural Biases, Beliefs, and Narratives as Factors of Accidental Evil; Thomas Olsson
- Chapter 4. Calculating, Reducing, Compensating, and Disconnecting: Summons of Digital Excess; Minna Vigren, Tero Karppi, and Olli Pyyhtinen
- Section 2. Infrastructures and Materiality
- Chapter 5. The Archival Paradox: DNA-Based Data Storage and the Data Hoarding Crisis; Mél Hogan, Deb Verhoeven, and Tessa J. Brown
- Chapter 6. This Photograph has Never Been in a Data Centre: An Experimental Intervention in Pursuit of Responsible Research Practice; Flora Mary Bartlett and Julia Velkova
- Chapter 7. Platform Opacity in the Global E-waste Dilemma; Lauren E. Bridges and Vusumuzi Maphosa
- Section 3. Discourses of Responsibility
- Chapter 8. Counter Accounts and Digital Advocacy: How Activists Enforce Platform Companies’ Environmental Accountability; Markus Ojala and Mervi Pantti
- Chapter 9. Challenging Plastic Polluters: Public Shaming Campaigns on Plastic Pollution on Social Media Platforms; Steph Hill
- Chapter 10. Greening the Platforms or Organisational Bullshit? A Typology of Empty and Misleading Environmental Communication by Global Platform Companies; Meri Frig, Olga Dovbysh, and Salla-Maaria Laaksonen
- Chapter 11. Climate Justice in Big Tech’s Environmental Reporting; Mervi Pantti and Elis Karell
- Closing Words
- Afterword: Big Tech in a World-In-Crisis; Simon Cottle
Salla-Maaria Laaksonen is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Consumer Society Research and an Adjunct Professor of Media and Communication studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
Mervi Pantti is Professor in Media and Communication Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland.
Olga Dovbysh is a postdoctoral researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Finland.