Streaming Media’s Environmental Impact

Abstract

This group of articles, which arose from a panel planned for the 2020 annual meeting of members of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, draws attention to an unpopular but inescapable issue: the adverse environmental effects of streaming media. Four of these brief interventions focus on streaming media's carbon footprint, estimated by some to be 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (The Shift Project 2019). This startling figure is rising at a calamitous rate as more people around the world stream more media at higher bandwidth-now exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Another factor in streaming media's environmental impact is even less welcome: the deleterious effects of higher levels of electromagnetic frequencies that media corporations' turn to fifth-generation (5G) wireless technology would exacerbate. These effects are well documented yet almost universally ignored. Despite all these findings, the notion abides that digital media are immaterial. Laura U. Marks introduces the research challenges involved in calculating the carbon footprint of streaming media and suggests actions consumers and media makers can take to mitigate this environmental threat. Joseph Clark discusses the implications of digitizing huge amounts of archival film and connects material histories of news film production, distribution, and preservation or disposal to contemporary issues of digital storage, streaming, and energy use, using the newsreel archive as a case study. Jason Livingston's contribution expands on his droll and disturbing video lecture, which presents a speculative app for mobile phones that tracks streaming, correlates it to energy use and CO 2 emissions, and suggests methods to mitigate usage. Denise Oleksijczuk introduces scientific research on the health and environmental impacts of high levels of electromagnetic frequencies and suggests ways, including creative practice, to break through the resistance to these findings among telecommunications companies, governments, and the public. Lucas Hilderbrand focuses on best practices in teaching: how to educate our students Laura U. Marks' most recent book is Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (MIT, 2015). She programs experimental media art for venues around the world and is the founder of the Small File Media Festival and a founding member of the Substantial Motion Research Network. Marks

Social Media Platforms and their Digital Carbon Footprints: Analyzing Awareness Level of Social Media Users of Punjab, Pakistan

“…According in CO 2 emissions year after year. In a similar study conducted by Marks et al, (2020) streaming online data is responsible for 58-60 percent of internet traffic and emits 300 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, which roughly adds up to 1 percent of overall emissions (First 2022) BBC reported that 58 percent of all downstream traffic on the internet is video, followed by web browsing at 17 percent, gaming at 7.8 percent, and social media at 5.1 percent [9]. Other forms of media streaming include YouTube, 11.4 percent, embedded video on Webpages 13.1 percent and web searching 7.8 percent [15].…”

“…As a matter of fact, digital technologies' energy utilization increased by nearly 70 percent between 2013 and 2020 Fig. shows the absolute CO 2 emissions of all snaps, transferred or sent, in the year 2015 [9]. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have 80 million, 350 million, and 4.5 billion pictures per day, a remarkable amount of data with a huge impact in terms of CO 2 emissions, which increases every year [10].…”

Situating Data

“…This research results in interest for critical questions pertaining to issues of power such as labor, discrimination, exploitation, and surveillance. We now also increasingly encounter studies exploring the adverse environmental (material) effects of streaming media (Lobato 2019;Marks et al 2020) and prompts for intensifying such concerns in environmental media studies or green(ing) media studies (Keilbach and Pabiś-Orzeszyna 2022).…”

Zrównoważona produkcja filmowa w Polsce. Geneza i perspektywy

“…Poszerzające podejście do tematu prezentuje monografia Streaming media's environmental impact [Marks et al 2020]. Zwraca uwagę na niepopularny, ale nieunikniony problem niekorzystnego wpływu mediów strumieniowych (czyli działających na zasadzie jednoczesnego przesyłania i odbioru danych audio i wideo za pomocą sieci komputerowej) na środowisko.…”