Online Trash and Global Poverty
DISCLAIMER - This blog is not meant to malign Evernote or Instapaper in any way.
Despicable habits like spitting and peeing in public are banned in most civilized societies. Why then do netizens clog the internet with trash! While nobody is concerned, especially service providers as it gives them an opportunity to expand their businesses, proliferation of mega datacenters is partly due to accumulation of online trash.
So what is online trash. Online trash is basically data, stored on the Internet, that you no longer need. This includes e-mails, web page clippings, useless multimedia files, etc. An average internet user produces several megabytes of trash every month - and that is a conservative estimate. The emergence of content replication sites and tools have added to the problem. Sites like Instapaper and Evernote allow you to "clip" entire web pages so you can read them later. iCloud might just compound that problem by allowing people to move media files into the cloud.
I ran a small experiment to see how much such trash "costs". You will be amazed at how much money AND space is actually wasted every year. Given the global food crisis, even a small fraction of this money could have been used to feed poor and hungry people.
Most of my assumptions are conservative and I'm sure that the real numbers are much higher. I'm not a bleeding-heart socialist - the IT industry pays my salary. What I AM concerned about is the growing global food crisis and how we can solve it in a meaningful manner.
And oh, all the ongoing conflicts are the biggest reason for the food crisis, but there's very little the IT industry can do about that.
Despicable habits like spitting and peeing in public are banned in most civilized societies. Why then do netizens clog the internet with trash! While nobody is concerned, especially service providers as it gives them an opportunity to expand their businesses, proliferation of mega datacenters is partly due to accumulation of online trash.
So what is online trash. Online trash is basically data, stored on the Internet, that you no longer need. This includes e-mails, web page clippings, useless multimedia files, etc. An average internet user produces several megabytes of trash every month - and that is a conservative estimate. The emergence of content replication sites and tools have added to the problem. Sites like Instapaper and Evernote allow you to "clip" entire web pages so you can read them later. iCloud might just compound that problem by allowing people to move media files into the cloud.
I ran a small experiment to see how much such trash "costs". You will be amazed at how much money AND space is actually wasted every year. Given the global food crisis, even a small fraction of this money could have been used to feed poor and hungry people.
| Size of a 300-word HTML article (no images) | 50 KB |
| Number of Evernote users | 1000000 (1 million) |
| Assuming that 25% of them "clip" articles every day, data replicated daily. [.25 X 1000000 X 50] | ~12 GB |
| Data replicated per year by Evernote users. [360 X 12] | 4404019.2 MB OR 4320 GB OR 4.2 TB |
| Price of memory | 0.0122 $/MB |
| Cost of one year's worth of online trash [4404019.2 X 0.0122] | $ 53729/- OR 2413701.61/- (rupees) |
| Cost of feeding two children for a year | $50/- OR 2246.17 Indian Rupees |
| Number of children who could have been fed had this memory not been wasted. [2413701.61/2246.17] | 1074 |
Most of my assumptions are conservative and I'm sure that the real numbers are much higher. I'm not a bleeding-heart socialist - the IT industry pays my salary. What I AM concerned about is the growing global food crisis and how we can solve it in a meaningful manner.
And oh, all the ongoing conflicts are the biggest reason for the food crisis, but there's very little the IT industry can do about that.
:) Well calculated and important perspective on net Junk!!
ReplyDeletethanks Siddarth!
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