We are an energy-based society......

Without energy to spare, we as a whole would cease to exist in any form that resembles what we know and take for granted.

How do we square that?

No, no no, no ,no!

Yet another doomsayer. Yet another Armageddon. Digital toys will not doom us to oblivion, they are out saviours. Here's how:

There are seven billion people out there. If we all decided to actually do something, instead of playing video games, there would be one hell of a crowd.

Video games keep the kids indoors, instead of stomping the environment to death.

Cell phones keep adults from actually driving across town to talk to one another. Women can chat about this and that as they daub their faces with lipstick and makeup.

Guys can watch hockey and football gamez instead of slashing one another to death with broken bottles.

It keeps the kids busy, the women are happy, the cosmetic companies make billions and the breweries sell lots of suds.

Don't knock the gizmos. They are the only thing standing between us and ourselves. If all the gadgets quit working, it would be instant WWIII in the 'hood.

The price is a bit more gallium and iridium in the landfill. So the ducks had better watch which worm they eat. Tough luck; Darwin rules!

micro-world

Perhaps the biggest tragedy with all these digital toys - kids now grow up indoors in a fake virtual world, in complete isolation from the real, living, natural world. They now spend almost no time getting to know all the plants and animals of the real miraculous and mysterious world they have been convinced to turn their backs on.

Solution: use your computer longer than three years!

The article states [computers] "don't last longer than three years". But that is a self-serving computer industry myth propagated to generate sales through unneeded hardware upgrades which is a source of much of the problem the author is (rightly) concerned about.

In fact, with some minimal care computers tend to have long lifetimes. (I am writing this from a four-year old computer, and I expect it to last another 6 years at least.) Protect your computer's electronics from spikes in the power using a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). UPS's do add slightly to the energy footprint of computers, but they far more than pay for themselves by prolonging the life of your computer. Take the time to blow dust out of your computer once per year. Getting rid of accumulated dust prolongs the life of your computer by making it much easier for the computer cooling system to do its job. When one component of your computer fails such as a fan or hard drive, replace that component rather than automatically using that component failure as an excuse to replace the whole computer. Use a Linux-based operating system (e.g., Ubuntu, RedHat, or SuSe) that doesn't artificially force hardware upgrades. Don't buy electronic gadgets dedicated to just one purpose. (I agree with the author this is a major issue.) Instead, use your computer's general-purpose capabilities to provide the same functionality. For example, I don't own a PlayStation or Xbox; a TV, or a DVD player. Instead, I play games on my computer, watch TV on my computer (via a TV card), and watch DVD's on my computer as well. Finally, LED's are notorious for their long life so when I recently replaced our 15-year old and 10-year old monitors, I made sure the LCD displays I bought were back-lit using LED's.

@Granville

the example you give for digital toys to be our 'saviours sounds a hell of a lot more like doomsday to me.

The use of meaningless

The use of meaningless statistics cited to support one's case,as this article does, does not help it's credibility.

We are in a worldwide depression and overall, people are buying less and paying down debts. When this kind of things happen it is possible to have a percentage rise in one kind of commodity even if the actual numbers are purchased remain the same. If people buy less overall, but they still buy the same amount of electronic toys, the "increase in percent" is meaningless, but the author gives no evidence that this is not so.

Even if it is so that people

Even if it is so that people are buying more "electronic gadget", a claim not supported by any figure in the article, and even if their energy and carbon footprints are as bad as claimed, this still does not mean anything unless one compares what is being bought against what is now not being bought, which again the article neglects entirely.

All in all whether the

All in all whether the article is right or wrong, it does not meet the journalistic standards that I expect from the Tyee. It should be withdrawn or corrected to include the important information it does not include, but should have.

Tyee folks, I am very disappointed that you published this article as it is.

The misuse of misleading statistics I expect from the mainstream press in this province, and they are beyond hope. From the Tyee I expect better and higher standards.

cross pupose

When computers started to make a breakghrough, the idea was to do away with paper-files!
LOL
Now everybody prints any and every scrap of info and stacks them in some cabinet, never to be seen again.

emancipation

"...many citizens are embracing true emancipation by banishing non-essential digital slaves from the household."

This is the crux of what we need to accomplish, for sure. But what about our obscenely large refrigerators in North America? Huge washing machines? I have three pretty important gadgets: a smart phone, a fairly new laptop, a hard drive back up. The range of things these have replaced are fairly astounding, I think - a landline phone, a radio, an alarm clock, a watch, a TV, a DVD player, a stereo amp and CD player. I have digitized my music and old family photos...I guess the point is that the first issue of sustainability, as I see it, is buying less, but I am not sure that equates with giving up the real advantages of some technologies.In any event, we - the consumer - are ultimately responsible for manufacturing processes, so conserving, and repairing, and using products to the end of their lifetimes will have to become second nature.

A young friend of mine just moved into her own apartment, and she has some gadgets too. But they pale in comparison to what she doesn't have, and what fills every corner of her parent's home.It strikes me that her generation has embraced technology as tools to accomplish things, while other generations still view them as symbols - things to fill up the vast empty spaces inside their hearts, if not homes.

MC24: The world will not end with a bang, but with a whimper

More like a few beeps and a lame squeak. Don't bemoan the impact of video games. The world the kids who play them are living in their own world. It is not less real than the unreal world we grew up in.

The real point is that kids today do suffer from an ailment called "Nature Deficit Disorder", a term coined by Richard Louv in hos book, "Last Child in the Woods". Kids actually spend less than half the time they used to, in the woods or just plain outdoors.

The problem is real, but the solution could be worse. The electronics industry is one of the very few growth industries today. If we lost that, it would create such a severe depression that no one would be happy.
The solution to a technological problem is NOT to go backwards, ever. You just can't.

Ed ...

While I agree that some people who buy gadgets may not be buying other things, as VivianLea points out, isn't the point that we are buying TOOOOO much of many things. Things are not made to last or else, with gadgets, it's a never-ending "upgrade" scenario. That is obscene. We resisted upgrading our 15-year-old iMac until only last month when it kept crashing.
Unthinking gadget purchasing is a juggernaut that's destroying our planet and making most of us heads-down, screen-obsessed drones.
My only personal gadget is my laptop which my job demands. I survive very well without a cell phone or e-reader.

Ed ...

While I agree that some people who buy gadgets may not be buying other things, as VivianLea points out, isn't the point that we are buying TOOOOO much of many things. Things are not made to last or else, with gadgets, it's a never-ending "upgrade" scenario. That is obscene. We resisted upgrading our 15-year-old iMac until only last month when it kept crashing.
Unthinking gadget purchasing is a juggernaut that's destroying our planet and making most of us heads-down, screen-obsessed drones.
My only personal gadget is my laptop which my job demands. I survive very well without a cell phone or e-reader.

one solution iFound

Like the typographic pun?

Anyway, I bought a wireless Apple keyboard to use with my (2 yr old) iPhone. It essentially turns my phone into a tiny laptop computer using bluetooth to connect the keyboard to the iPhone. If, like me, you need to send emails, do a little writing, enter data into a spreadsheet etc, I've found this combination pretty darn useful even with an old iPhone (3G) -- although it did require jailbreaking the phone and a bit of fiddling around with apps etc. No such hassles with new models AFAIK. Anyway, if you need to do a bit of work or whatever on the road and have an iPhone, it may well be a great way to avoid having to buy a laptop or netbook, saving you some money and keeping a bit more plastic and alloy out of the landfill.

I blame the Tyee

Advertising right now on the front page, Buy Shaw Broadband!
or
Download Tyee smartphone app!
(well I gotta blame someone, it can't be MY fault....)

gadgets

As a school counsellor for the past 30 years I'm dismayed at the amount of time little boys are spending playing Call of Duty, and then in school they're diagnosed with ADD and put on Ritalin. I recently took away the router at home until my son brought his Grade 12 marks up, since he was spending far too much time on Star Craft. He'd been an avid reader until a few years ago when he started playing on line. I've just watched the BC Ministry of Education dump their 90 milliion dollar BCESIS computer program that they insisted every school in B.C. enroll in 4 years ago. It was a dog as any teacher/counsellor who used it, told them. The amount of adults I know who feel such joy at upgrading their expensive phones and boring the rest of us with every new app speaks to this article. so much of this stuff is unnecessary or worse counter productive to realizing our full potential as human beings. Now the studies of how sedentary lives (due to sitting in front of screens for hours each day) are ruining our collective health, are surfacing. I hate the thought of us damming more beautiful wilderness rivers so that more people can be on Facebook, Call of Duty, downloading movies and music etc. Or polluting our environment as they throw away 2 year old electronics to get the "latest". Sigh, yours truly, a discerning Luddite.

Be careful what you wish for, worried.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/potential.png

Thanks for doing the hard

Thanks for doing the hard work Andrew. Going to read this article a few times.

Ramona777

"isn't the point that we are buying TOOOOO much of many things."

Well, actually, the reason we are in a depression right now is largely that people aren't buying enough things to give everyone jobs making those things.

But yes, I do believe people buy too much of many things, but that is a personal belief, not a fact, unless and until the evidence supports me. The person in question is complaining that we purchase too much of a certain kind thing yet gives no evidence that this is so. Even worse he draws invalid conclusions from an observation that may or may not be significant.

And his whole argument is based upon it being so. He may be right or he may be wrong, but conclusions drawn from bad arguments or no argument are, as here, likely to be bad ones. And that shouldn't be allowed to happen on the Tyee

Really?

"the reason we are in a depression right now is largely that people aren't buying enough things to give everyone jobs making those things".

To put this in perspective we should all go buy a new Hummer and a few computers?

How about we just realize that the age of mechanization was supposed to relieve people from working at tedious jobs, and that in turn should allow us all to have shorter working weeks, still producing what we need!

Of course the owners of those factories never passed on the savings, and so the unemployed stood in line begging for any job at any price.

Our glorious media blames it all on greedy unions, but the media is owned by the same elite as the factory owners belong to --- so what do we expect?

All part of the 99% v/s the 1%

Everyone is right of course

The gadgets are alienating our kids from nature and the world.
So what on earth can we do about it?
Those little widgets are here to stay.
The key is that only some of the kids are addicted. They are lost.
Some of them are not.

New and cool, worse than autos

Bought an Apple IIGs in 1988 (colour Mac graphic interface during DOS days). It lasted through 19 years of heavy use.

Hope this Mac hand me down lasts half that time. 3 or 4 years is a joke unless you "just got to have the latest bells and whistles". Too slow for those on line games. Don't need or want Call of Duty or such desensitizing violence.

Perhaps the opposite of competitive capitalism is required, make things more expensive so people take better care of their electronics and demand higher quality of the manufacturers. Ha ha, ain't gonna happen in this culture.

A hardware designer I know got accolades for new chip designs, but after the company was bought up, the new boss told him to produce, not 2 new chip designs a year but 3 a month. Wonder why things break down so quickly?

Asked questions from Nokia 6 years ago about this whole issue, the war in Congo for cheap Coltan in every unit, and so cheap or even free for the hardware, but account breakers for some monthly plans.

I wonder how many perfectly good mobiles are in the landfills because they couldn't produce a cool ring tone or, a little later, didn't have a camera?

vivian lee

You weren't "buying less" so much as you were "buying smart" - a point that eludes many of us, and is not particularly encouraged by industry in general.