Page 74 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

5 DIGITAL DESIRES: MEDIATED CONSUMERISM AND CLIMATE CRISIS 59

to power industrial plant in the form of servers (see Maxwell and Miller
2012). So, for example, a 2013 report from the Center for Energy-Efficient
Telecommunications (CEET) described how the huge growth in wireless
connectivity to cloud services was driving an increase in carbon footprint
from six megatonnes of CO 2 in 2012 to up to 30 megatonnes of CO 2 in
2015, the equivalent of adding 4.9 million cars to the roads (Vertatique
2014). For most of us this storage is unseen, creating the misleading
impression of a digital world that it is ephemeral and devoid of physicality.
Nonetheless, the reduction in the production and disposal of objects like
books, newspapers, photographs, magazines, records, CDs or DVDs should
enable a significant reduction in carbon emissions. The roadblock here is
economic rather than technical: in a commercial world, the growth of
virtual content is also bad for business. In media sectors like music and
news, for example, it is difficult to monetise the virtual world, forcing those
sectors to create new business models that will never be as profitable as
those they replaced. The newspaper industry is hit with a double whammy:
only a few newspapers have wealthy enough niche markets to successfully
impose firewalls and charge people for online content, while advertising
revenue for online editions is significantly less than it is for print. So despite
increases in the amount of copy produced by journalists (Lewis et al.
2008), the industry has seen significant reductions in the number of
newsroom employees over the last 10 years (McChesney and Nichols
2010). This continues apace—according to the Pew Research Centre
(2014), who recorded a 10% drop in just 12 months (http://www.
journalism.org/2016/06/15/newspapers-fact-sheet/).
The reduction in revenues in the music industry has been even more
dramatic. In the 1980s, the industry’s control over production and dis-
tribution allowed it to engineer a highly profitable shift from vinyl to CDs.
The rise of the internet to become the main form of music distribution
meant a significant loss of control. The shift from CDs and vinyl to
downloads and streaming services, despite aggressive policing of intel-
lectual property law, have had a profound impact on its profitability.
While the consumption of music remains high, global revenues over the
last 20 years have almost halved (http://ifpi.org/news/IFPI-GLOBAL-
MUSIC-REPORT-2016).
For the non-commercial creative sector—the BBC, for example—this is
not an issue, since their income does not depend upon selling content. If it