Cyberspace & Sustainability

Cyberspace & Sustainability

The logic for exploring the synergy between cyberspace and sustainability can be described in the terms of inquiry in The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. In this book, Brown and Duguid identify six forces unleashed by advances in Information Technology (IT):

• Demassification
• Decentralization
• Denationalization
• Despatialization
• Disintermediation
• Disaggregation

These are considered to be fundamental correlates of cyber venues that altered the social fabric in new and powerful ways.

Brown and Duguid (2000) argue that these forces—which we call here the “6 D’s”—are critical and distinct properties of the cyber context. Although they do not address growth, development, or sustainability, it is not too much of a stretch to assign these same forces have central roles in the nascent domain of sustainable development.

At the very least, massification, materialization, spatialization, and centralization reinforce the ways in which human beings continue to stress and damage the natural environment. Clearly, none of the stresses or impacts is intentional; rather, they are largely the by-products of routine human activities.

Of course, neither cyberspace nor sustainability can be reduced to the 6 D’s; nonetheless, these forces may harbor both mutually reinforcing dynamics and hidden complexities.  For example, while any alternative to continued growth will involve a great deal of dematerialization, we cannot yet argue that an expansion of cyberspace will also have the same effect.

As a practical matter, the 6 D’s, individually and jointly, are currently located at the periphery of contemporary theory in terms of social relations, political behavior, power politics, and economic growth.  To illustrate the synergy argument more specifically, the figure below shows four cases across two issues, cyber access and sustainability. The entries in the quadrants show different types of situations in policy and practice and different modalities of the synergy at hand.

In principle, we anticipate that development strategies in the twenty-first century will increasingly shift away from the bottom left quadrant and toward the top right quadrant. Such an outcome would be contingent on reducing barriers to cyber access and on the acceptance of sustainable development as the dominant paradigm shaping the authoritative allocation of value in terms of who gets what, when, and how.  It would also be contingent on a continued convergence of cyberspace and sustainability, which are two independent processes with no obvious common origins.

To increase the likelihood of the anticipated shift toward knowledge-intensive sustainability solutions, and in a situation of relatively under-developed scientific and technological foundations for sustainable development, it is imperative that existing knowledge of all types be readily accessible to interested communities everywhere.  Over time, we expect access to cyber venues to reinforce the synergy and to improve performance along the cyber and the sustainability trajectories.

References:

Choucri, N. (2012). Cyberpolitics in international relations. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cyberpolitics-international-relations

Brown, J. S., & Duguid P. (2000). The social life of information. Harvard Business School Press. https://www.worldcat.org/title/social-life-of-information/oclc/968690237