Handling our resources with care is something we do in our daily lives.
We recycle our waste and try to avoid unnecessary trash in the first place.
But when it comes to the internet, we still display medieval behavior, maybe even worse, after all, we don´t want to offense our fellow medieval people.
Obviously I am not talking about recycling data or bits and bytes, but rather our general idea of how we use data and how poorly we manage our resources in this context. Part of the reason I have put up this blog is sparked by this idea.
Vlogging is one of these examples: Many Vlogs are at their core, a person talking into a camera.
There is no advantage in producing a video for most of these cases. As the script is already written in most cases, it would be much better to just release a blog entry.
It´s more convenient the critics might say. I disagree. You just release your script, done!
Videos require a camera, editing, uploading huge chunks of data, all of which takes much more resources, than just a regular blog.
According to Youtube® itself, every minute 300 hours of video are uploaded. If we assume the average video to be of 720p quality, this is ~ 200 Terabyte of data every hour or ~1700 Petabyte of data each year.
If we assume an average hard disk to be of 1 Terabyte, Youtube® alone needs about ~1.7 million hard drives each year.
Flooding the internet with such amounts of data is omnipresent and has a very real impact on the
economy and the environment.
In fact it´s one of the reasons Youtube® is not profitable as of now. At least partially because so many videos require huge server parks.
The fact, people uploading their videos in ever increasing quality makes this even worse.
Uploading a podcast as a video, containing mostly stock footage in 1080p 60 fps is simply a waste of resources for example.
While Youtube® remains mostly resilient to good advise and is eager to burn more and more money, the average person could change this, by using the resources suited to its purposes.
Not to help Google, but in order to act responsible, especially in terms of environmental aspects.
Releasing a video to share your opinion is simply Overkill (https://amzn.to/2CS18iY*) most of the time.
To illustrate my point I have compared the size of a video, I had made a while ago and compared it to the size of audio only and text only.
The difference is enormous:
Format|Size
.txt(UTF-8) = 9 kb
mp3@64kbit/s =1960 kb
mp4@720p 30fps = 318000 kb
So the .txt file is ~217 times smaller than the audio file, while the audio file still is ~162 times smaller than the video.
Compared to the video, the text file is ~35000 times smaller. Translated to hard drives, this is a lot!
Here is a small picture to give you a visual idea, how this compares:
As can be seen, a video is a true waste in comparison to anything else.
Shitposting is another topic, I want to address here. Browsing random videos on Youtube® proves my point. Many of them are of no great value or at very least don´t require a whole video to be made.
Before we loose ourselves in a discussion what is true value, I would just suggest to delete videos, which haven´t been seen for a certain amount of years. Since then, they aren´t of any value to their audience anymore.
This is only one example of how to get rid of old data but I think a lot of companies would save themselves a lot of trouble by deleting old files every now and then.
This would allow for much greater efficiency and resource savings.
Therefore it might be required to change laws regarding archiving data, in favour of companies. Even better if we are able to get rid off some
useless laws in the process.
Of course reducing the amount of shitposting by ourselves is a big factor itself and the one I approve of the most.
The problem is, that shitposting can be profitable as well, which is probably why most people still upload huge chunks of data. This is maybe one of the rare occasions an european law regarding the internet actually has proven somewhat useful.
Since the european union forces its individuals to hand out an imprint for non private content, it is somewhat harder to profit from shitposting.
Since the european union forces its individuals to hand out an imprint for non private content, it is somewhat harder to profit from shitposting.
When you are no longer anonymous, you are less likely to post questionable content. Nevertheless this tickles my Orwellian sensors and I am no proponent of this idea.
The senseless data collecting is another problem, we face. Facebook®, Google® and other companies are collecting so much data, it boggles the mind.
According to Forbes, we are producing 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day. A large chunk of this is attributed to personal data collection.
While some of this data produces a certain value, for example Google® now predicts future influenza waves, much of the collected data is most likely worthless.
It gets mostly collected in case there will be a possible use in the future for it. This is somewhat understandable.
But having direct insight into this process, I can tell, companies are collecting and transmitting data which doesn´t have any use at all.
This is why I hope developers might take care of this point. They are often directly in charge of what kind of data gets transmitted and/or collected.
One example on this are data tracking solutions in the internet of things: Usually they transmit a lot of data, which is not needed for a given process.
On some point, this often causes problems in terms of storage and bandwidth, so keep this in mind!
Especially when up scaling, relatively small data packages with unnecessary content become your nightmare in this field.
The same applies for website design and advertisement management. Many websites these days are bloated, full of scripts and the advertisement banner is a high quality video. Be aware, that everyone visiting your website will multiply the amount of the data transmitted and processed.
Here the content providers, such as me, should consider these factors.
Simple measures could be sufficient to overcome this problem:
-Keep it as static as possible on your website
-Only allow advertisements, not using much space such as links and small pictures and gifs
-Avoid scripts and cookies as much as possible
-Keep your design simple and minimalist
-Use links to the original source instead of providing the same information on your website
-make use of compression, by using Dithering or use some nice ASCII-art like this:
'(OvO)' <----Look, an owl!
-maybe considering self-hosting with minimal equipment, like this:
Applying some of this into the world of commercial websites, it might be a good idea to create an ISO-standard for resource friendly website design.
Taking this a step further would include general resource friendly standards for the digital economy.
Companies then could improve their public image by this and also potentially save resources and money.
Another possibility to reduce our energy and resource consumption could be, to use a different way of accounting for data transmission.
Currently a lot of private contracts regarding internet connections are bound to download and upload speeds.
Maybe future offerings should be bound to maximum download and upload sizes as well. This could provide an incentive to reduce data transfer and possibly make internet contracts much cheaper. For example I have found out, that most of the time I really don´t need more than 100 mb of data per month to be transmitted viá the mobile network. Everything else, I do viá Wi-Fi and even that is mostly under 2 GB a month.
Taking this a step further, it might be a good idea to be able to restrict the upload and download speeds as well and make everything configurable.
Congstar® for example allows for flexible tariffs on their mobile data contracts.
It is possible to up- or downsize your monthly data transfer volume and as a result your price changes accordingly. If you use up more, than your current limit, then your connection will be slowed down to a lower speed.
A possible win-win situation for providers as well as the consumer, since both are able to save resources.
Pay for what you actually use, seems an viable option for providers and users as well in this case.
Pay for what you actually use, seems an viable option for providers and users as well in this case.
For more details on speed limits for the internet also see this blog:
As nearly always, everyone is in charge in questioning his or her behavior on this topic, as it affects us all and the environment around us.
Creating awareness and educating on it is the first step in making a change. Although not a fan of creating more laws and ISO´s, the latter could help in bringing a more sustainable mindset into the economy. In fact companies could profit from a more careful mindset on this issue, as well as the customer and the environment.
Further reading and sources:
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