Is there a darker side to technological advances?

For once, it’s a quiet Monday morning and I have set aside an hour to read some papers online. Technological advances mean that I don’t have to pay for the content of these papers (yet) and that I don’t even need to leave the comfort of my home. Just boot up the computer while the coffee brews and enjoy the download speeds that go with a broadband connection. While my ‘netvibes’ site provides connections to favourite newspapers and news sites, the recently turned 11 year old ‘google’ search engine is always there ready to help me with anything extra I may want to find. So with the means to enlightenment at my fingertips I start this day in a positive state of mind.

Technology is making my life easier and more interesting. But is there a darker side to our penchant for technological advances? According to ‘Good Environmental Choice-Australia’ the creation of the average computer will require “240kg of fossil fuels, 22kg of chemicals and 150kg of water”. It’s important to note that some of those 22kg of chemicals are non-biodegradable and toxic.

With this in mind, I read Elisabeth Rosenthal’s article in today’s NYT about how 20 million containers of waste are shipped from Europe to poorer developing each year. This waste shipment is underpinned by a desire to avoid the high costs associated with recycling goods in Europe.

While some of this material will be recycled, the act of recycling can, and often is, problematic. A CBS documentary provides graphic details of the darker side to technological advances. The human misery associated with recycling has been documented in a photo report and in a magazine article about the Chinese village of Guiyu. The photos posted on Alistair.ruff’s photostream on flickr are equally confronting.

Each time we update to the latest mobile phone or some other high-tech electronic gadget we are encouraging the mining of ‘coltan’. This is a rare mineral ore that contains tantalum which is needed to manufacture these gadgets. Unfortunately, the mining of coltan is causing rapid deforestation in central Africa and endangering the habitat of many African primates, including the Western Lowland Gorillas.

With these issues in mind, it’s rather apt that today is Confucius’s birthday. His philosophy of morality and justice at both a personal and governmental level give us pause for thought. So I finish this despatch in a less jovial frame of mind but with a gritty determination to track down some less harmful ways to recycle electronic gadgets:

1. Old mobile phones: See the Taronga Zoo appeal

2. Planet Ark recycling depots

Fashion, dust and more - tales from the internet

I found myself trying to explain to a group of students the other day the need for them to consider the overlap between their own experiential field and that of their potential consumer group. This led me to reflect on how I could encourage them to use photography to gain greater insights into the world around them. So here are a few of my thoughts as I explored ‘the world’ through another person’s lens.

First stop had to be the ‘The Sartorialist’ – a quick way to spot emerging fashions or a fantastic way to catch a glimpse of human emotion and to reassure myself that we are not facing an obesity pandemic. Can it be true that only the little size folk like to take an interest in clothes?

Much bemused, my next destination was to head to the NYT to check out whether obesity was still an issue. It was but I got sidetracked by a story about a dust storm in Australia.

As the author of these despatches, I felt it my duty to be able to report on whether this recent bit of dust matched up to previous such events. I remember a few total “blackouts” from dust storms as a kid when literally you could not see anything and you felt time stand still in the eerie pause before the winds hit. Here is a more recent photo of a dust storm in the making. 15 minutes after this photo was taken, the road was totally blacked out.


So I headed to the National Library of Australia online archive of photographs to see if they had any records of prior dust storms. Unhappily, the black and white photos in their archive don’t do justice to what it must have been like back then when scrub was being demolished to make way for ‘soldier settler farms’. But great we have some records for comparison.

Then, thinking about the power of social media, I thought about my friend Flickr (not the book but the photography site). Sure enough, lots of lovely colour pictures of the Sydney dust storm but no archived historical records for this new babe on the block.

Thinking of old books and dust storms led me to think about John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and the dust bowl existence of the sharecroppers in Oklahoma. So my despatch ends with a great set of photos from the US taken during the Great Depression.

Greetings

Welcome! The purpose of this blog is to share my journey in learning to use social networking tools. For those of you already experts in tapping away your thoughts and sending them into cyberspace, this will be a very banal set of despatches.

I had better explain the title of this blog. The word antipode has many different meanings. A quick visit to wikipedia suggests that the term has traditionally been used by people residing ‘down under’ sending messages back to the motherland (aka UK). While this sounds logical, given that these despatches technically originate in Australia, I rather like the thought of antipodes being “any two places or regions on diametrically opposite sides of the Earth; "the North Pole and the South Pole are antipodes". Extending this metaphor a little, this gives me lots of scope to send my despatches from anywhere in cyberspace.