Computing Our Way to Paradise?: The Role of Internet and Communication Technologies in Sustainable Consumption and Globalization (Globalization and the Environment) - Hardcover

A timely, engaging read.... Highly recommended. * CHOICE, August 2010 * Computers, cell phones, and other novel information and communication technologies surround us, and will certainly shape our future. Can they help us move toward environmental sustainability, or will they make our impact on the environment worse? Computing Our Way to Paradise? offers the most comprehensive reply to those questions now available. It covers all the key issues, and, more importantly, it explores the big picture, the ways in which such technologies form part of our worldview, our capitalist economy, and our resource- and energy-intensive way of life. Computing Our Way to Paradise? reveals that only by understanding and acting on these fundamental matters can we fulfill the environmentally positive potential of our information and communication technologies. -- Josiah Heyman, director of the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies, University of Texas at El Paso This book amplifies the growing fissures emerging in our collective understanding of ICTs and how they can benefit sustainable consumption....This book is a timely and useful contribution to the debate on how we are to deal with unfolding social, economic, political and environmental chaos. It adds clarity to the unsustainable trends in consumer driven lifestyles, how ICTs drive them and how their extra-ordinary potential for a better future has yet to be fully harnessed. * The Learning Edge, Fall 2010 *

Rattle's new book challenges key assumptions concerning the role of Internet and communication technologies (ICTs) in globalization processes. The author argues that while globalization is predicated upon a strong, extensive, and interconnected global ICT network of products, processes, and services, the real environmental and health benefits remain far from certain. ICTs have been promoted as the next economic wave with the potential to generate jobs, wealth, and prosperity to surpass that of the industrial era. It is assumed the environmental impacts will be negligible or even beneficial in this shift towards a service economy. Rattle investigates these current and expected trends in ICTs and their potential contribution to sustainable development. His book is an indispensable overview for researchers and instructors in globalization, Internet communication technologies, and environmental anthropology or sociology, as well as a resource for policy makers in environmental protection, sustainable development, sustainable consumption, and the social role of science and technology.