27Toward a sustainable information society
A global political economy perspective
Does the arrival of digital media contribute to sustainable development of Planet Earth? When personal computers started to spread in the 1970s and 1980s, they carried the promise of a ‘paperless office’ that would save trees (Sellen & Harper, 2003). When the Internet began to diffuse in the 1990s, it was believed it would reduce gasoline consumption because people no longer needed to commute (Cairncross, 1997). A digital world, as Bill Gates famously put it, is supposed to be “friction-free” (1995). But how come a generation later, we see more signs of global warming, environmental distress, and planetary apocalypse, to the extent that the turn ...
