Painful Serendipity

This happens all the time in grad school: you study and work like mad to develop innovative ideas only to discover your amazing, new project is a recently launched product. It happens so often in fact that it has become a bit of a running joke among my classmates at SVA. A few weeks ago, my classmate Cooper discovered the LunaTick Touch Pen on Kickstarter which seemed to be the direct embodiment of months of thesis research from another classmate, Allison. Such much for pathos!

Well, today this feared occurence happened to me, but in the form of an article. In the recent issue of Wired, Clive Thompson outlines themes from the recently released book, The Conundrum by David Owen. Mr. Thompson describes the Jevons paradox: 

When steam engines became more efficient, the consumption of coal (for steam production) didn’t decrease – it expanded, because steam engines became cheaper to run and thus attractive for more and more things.

In a modern iteration, Jevons paradox is known as the rebound effect: as technology allows faster and easier access to a resource, that resource becomes cheaper and we use it up more quickly. Therein lies the issue; by creating efficiencies in fuel consumption, lightbulbs, and air conditioners only to use more, Mr.Owen argues we are creating our own environmental dichotomy. Mike Berners-Lee and I also apply this argument to our use of email, texts, and other forms of online communication. The act of uploading, distributing, and sharing content has become so easy that the high carbon act of writing a letter has been overwhelmed by countless, low carbon data transmissions.

While the concept is nothing new (Jevons introduced his concept in 1865), the rebound a effect was a nice little discovery I had in my pocket, waiting to be unleashed upon a crowd of a few dozen attendees at my thesis defense. But alas, no more. Clive Thompson and David Owen, with a readership in the millions, stole my thunder. In the end, this isn’t a Kickstarter project usurping my thesis project. I mean, my professor Rob Faludi described a version of the rebound effect to our Physical Computing class last year. Greenpeace even gives props to Jevons paradox in its’ recent report, “How dirty is your data?”

Hopefully, painful serendipity is only affirmation that me, Allison, and the rest of my classmates just might be onto something.

References:

Clive Thompson, “Unsaving the Planet,” Wired, March 2012.

What’s the carbon footprint of email?

Today, my fellow classmate Catherine Young passed along a link to an article directly relating to my thesis. (did I mention I pivoted? I pivoted). It begins to address the seemingly impossible task of quantifying an individual’s carbon dioxide output from using the Internet, most notably email. Apart from a rough estimation, the article mentions an important concept - the rebound effect. The rebound effect is a consequence of our evermore efficient technology; as technology allows faster use of a resource, the more of that resource is used.

(This might explain our lament of having no time.)

When applied to our increased use of computers, the result is, as the article states, “a low-carbon technology resulting in higher-carbon living simply because we use it more.”