When did we start to forget that computers, and everything they do, are still very much physical? The cobalt in the battery in my iPhone comes from Congo, the wifi starts with a router, cloud storage is stored in physical data farms across the world, and the processing required to run AI models like ChatGPT or Dall-E requires massive amounts of energy and water. Even internet depends on underwater cables stretched across the ocean! These are just a few examples.
I think understanding the inherent physicality of our technology infrastructure is a critical component of information and digital literacy in this age of consumption and climate change. Particularly, in this moment where AI is seemingly infiltrating everything. As a semi-recent example, the addition of AI summaries to a simple Google search is wholly unnecessary in my opinion (and sometimes, the blurb is flat out wrong!). It’s imperative that we as humans understand that something as simple as a Google search is using real, tangible energy, water, and materials as we deal with climate change.
This idea plays right back into my previous post this year about digital literacy, as well. Having a baseline understanding of the technology we use on a daily basis is critical. Now, do I know what every single part in my phone or laptop does? No – and I do not profess to be a mechanically minded person. But I am able to do some troubleshooting because I know the basics of how things operate, which is a higher level than I see in my students.
This concept of all the moving parts required to make our technology usable was just at the forefront of everyone’s mind with the entire Crowdstrike update fiasco. The Microsoft-using world was brought to its knees by faulty code. It wasn’t hard to fix your computer; it required booting your computer in safe mode and deleting a file. However, a lot of people don’t know how to do that, or if they do, a work computer may not allow anyone but admins to do so. It meant that the repairs had to be done manually by IT departments across the world. Technology is physical.
A post on this topic has truthfully been rattling around in my brain for months now, and I really want to just get it out into the world to hear what others are thinking about this. What are the ways that you get reminded about how physical technology is? How do you teach your students about this, if you do?
Update 8/12/24: A previous version of this post said that data farms were disproportionally located in the Global South. That has been corrected, with a link to a map of data farms.
This is a form of digital literacy that takes effort to learn. In my experience, it isn’t something that comes from being simply immersed in technology. It takes an openness to being curious, to risk messing things up, and then to research how to get yourself out of a jam.
As a _long time_ technology user and manager, I miss the physical boxes with sequences of blinking lights. To walk into a darkened machine room and marvel at how all of the lights are blinking in just the right way is how I stayed grounded.
Now we need to look for it in its hidden places. Books like 99% Invisible City (https://99percentinvisible.org/book/) show where those places are.
“cloud storage is stored in physical data farms that are disproportionally located in the Global South” — citation needed, please. Looking at https://www.datacentermap.com/ it seems like they are mostly in North America and Europe.
Hey Peter! Yes – I talk about that curiosity and openness in my last post on digital literacy. It’s something I’m really fascinated by.
I want to thank you for the link to 99% Invisible City and for the correction – I have updated the post and made a note about the update. I apologize – I thought I had linked my source there, but after combing through my Zotero library and comparing it to some other sources, that was incorrect.