Session Abstract
What is the environmental impact of of the internet? How can it be made more sustainable? While data centers have been a focus of public, research, and industry attention for over a decade, the fiber-optic cables that carry over 99% of transoceanic internet traffic rarely surface in studies of digital infrastructure's environmental impacts. In the past few years, however, subsea internet cables have been in the global spotlight. Disruptions in the Baltic Sea and off the coasts of Taiwan and Ivory Coast are now drawing attention this vast undersea system.
In this lecture, Starosielski describes approaches to developing a more sustainable internet drawn from her work coordinating sustainability initiatives for the global internet's backbone: subsea fiber-optic cables. Starosielski brings to light joint efforts within and beyond the subsea cable sector to mitigate emissions and enhance cable sustainability. Collaboration across sectors, with academia, and between technical domains is not only a possible, but also actionable path forward to reducing emissions impacts.
Speaker Bio
Nicole Starosielski conducts research on global internet and media distribution, communications infrastructures ranging from data centers to undersea cables, and media’s environmental and elemental dimensions. Starosielski is author or co-editor of over thirty articles and five books on media, infrastructure, and environments, including: The Undersea Network (2015), Media Hot and Cold (2021), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (2015), Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (2016), Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media (2021), as well as co-editor of the “Elements” book series at Duke University Press.
Starosielski’s most recent project, Sustainable Subsea Networks(link is external), is focused on increasing the sustainability of digital infrastructures. The project team has developed a catalog of best practices for sustainability in the subsea cable industry—the backbone of the global internet—as well as a carbon footprint of a subsea cable. Starosielski is also a co-convenor of the SubOptic Association’s Global Citizen Working Group.
Starosielski teaches classes and supervises projects on digital media, environmental media, media and communications infrastructures, media history and theory, and integrated media theory and production, among other areas.