Gatherings of an Infovore: Digital Pollution

Abstract

Add Another Type of Pollution to the List: Digital Pollution, as defined in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, is “the action of polluting especially by environmental contamination with man-made waste” and has been a constant in the world ever since humans began living in groups. Anthropologists have found human waste among the ruins of ancient settlements. The word pollution took over from the term industrial waste in the late 19th century, and the different types of pollution were identified throughout the 20th century with the 3 major types: air, land, and water, joined by noise, light, radioactive, thermal, and plastic pollution. Now in the 21st century, we are beginning to recognize that advances in technology have brought about a new type of pollution: digital pollution (sometimes also called information pollution or data pollution or e-waste). The literature describing digital pollution and various ways to measure its impacts is quite fragmented in type of publication and currency/depth of verified data from blog posts to white papers and articles in magazines/newspapers to those in peer-reviewed books and journals. Presented here is a cross-section of such resources to set you on the path of assessing whether now is the time for your organization to be concerned with the impact of its digital pollution. If interested, I suggest you contact Cambridge University Press. In 2021, the Press, along with Netflix and BT, began working with DIMPACT. DIMPACT is a pioneering initiative launched in 2019 by Carnstone, media companies, and researchers at the University of Bristol […]