The seminar is organized by Clément Marquet (CSI, Mines Paris – PSL, i3) and Sophie Quinton (Inria, GDS EcoInfo), as part of the Politiques environnementales du numérique [Digital Environmental Policies] working group of the GDR Internet, AI and Society.
The seminar will be held by videoconference. Participation is upon registration only.
For the past few years, the environmental consequences of digital technologies have been the subject of increasing attention [1], calling into question the promise of a convergence between ecological and digital transition. While these alerts are not altogether new [2], only recently have they attracted the attention of French political authorities [3]. This policy interest arises as the State and economic players invest massively in large-scale digital projects such as 5G, artificial intelligence, the autonomous vehicle and the Internet of Things. So many projects whose consequences cannot be accurately anticipated, but which in fact involve a proliferation of equipment and data. More generally, there still is a lack of in-depth reflection on the direct environmental impacts (energy and resource requirements, pollution, etc.) and indirect impacts (optimizations driving the overall increase in production and consumption, etc.) of digital technology.
The relationship between digital technologies and the environment is political, in that it is bound up with technical and economic choices made in the name of values such as availability, security, speed, profit, etc. These choices lead to relationships with natural resources, biodiversity, and human health, which are barely visible to users because of the apparent ease of circulation of information and of the use of a vocabulary built around dematerialization, the cloud, etc.
Learn more about the Politiques environnementales du numérique [Digital Environmental Policy] working group and the issues that structure its discussions.
This working group intends to progressively build up a community of researchers contributing to environmental studies of digital technologies [4], in particular through the organization of seminars. To build this interdisciplinarity, the working group collaborates with the EcoInfo service group (GDS) [5], which has been involved since 2006 in the measurement of the environmental consequences of ICT and the creation of services aimed at reducing their negative impacts within higher education and research.
Seminar program 2024/25
Thursday 21 November
Adrien Luxey-Bitri (Spirals, Univ. Lille, INRIA) — Organisation et maintenance collégiale d’une infrastructure communautaire de services numériques [Collective organisation and maintenance of a community infrastructure of digital services]
Thursday 19 December
Atelier (séance interne au groupe de travail) [Workshop (internal working group session)]
Thursday 20 February
Atelier (séance interne au groupe de travail) [Workshop (internal working group session; registration as a member of the working group]
Thursday 20 March
Marie Garin — De l’apprentissage fédéré vers une théorie critique de l’apprentissage hétéromatique [From federated learning to a critical theory of heteromatic learning]
Thursday 17 April
Atelier (séance interne au groupe de travail) [Workshop (internal working group session)]
Wednesday 30 April
Laura Kocksch (The Techno-Anthroplogy Lab at Aalborg University Copenhagen) — Fragile computing: Directions for developing post-optimistic technologies
Tuesday 13 May
Aude-Solveig Epstein (Université Paris Nanterre) — La régulation environnementale du numérique : Critique juridique de la “transition jumelle” (twin transition) [The environmental regulation of digital technology: a legal critique of the ‘twin transition’]
Thursday 19 June
Journée d’étude à Grenoble [Study day in Grenoble]
[1] See for instance TheShiftProject 2018 and the GreenIT 2019 reports.
[2] Flipo Fabrice, Michel Dobré, Marion Michot, La face cachée du numérique, Montreuil, Éditions L’échappée, 2013.
[3] In 2020, the French Senate launched a mission on the environmental footprint of digital technology, which, according to Hervé Maurey, chairman of the committee, “has not yet been the subject of parliamentary work and is giving rise to a gradual awareness.” At the same time, the National Digital Council and the High Council for the Climate were asked by Elisabeth Borne, then Minister of Ecological Transition and Solidarity, and Cedric O, then Secretary of State for the Digital Economy, to draw up a roadmap with a dual objective: “to reduce the environmental footprint of digital technology in order to create a sustainable digital economy, and to turn digital technology into a driver of ecological transition and solidarity”.
[4] Ensmenger Nathan, “The Environmental History of Computing”, Technology and Culture, 2018, 59, 4S, p. S7-S33 ; Shriver-Rice Meryl, Hunter Vaughan, “What is Environmental Media Studies”, Journal of Environmental Media, 2020, 1, 1, p. 3-13.