What is the cost of information seeking on the internet?

Creating a Greener World by Improving Information Literacy Skills

It is anticipated that the CO2 emissions, caused by Information Technologies (IT) related productions and consumptions  will be increased to 3% of the global total CO2 emissions until 2020 (Mithas and others, 2010). On the other hand, if correct and efficient decisions and actions are taken  and if environmental friendly IT solutions are used, it will be possible to prevent CO2 emission of up to 15% of today’s emission by 2020 (Boccaletti and others, 2008).

All individuals, especially the information professionals actively using these technologies and the academic circles bear tremendous responsibility in decreasing IT originated emissions and in the creation of environmental consciousness.  Digital information and communication technologies and increasing rate of data usage, particularly in the higher education, requires huge storage/backup systems (Greenpeace, 2011).      

In order to create a sustainable and egalitarian development model, each individual must be aware of the environmental impacts of his/her daily activities. This awareness is indispensable in preventing the destruction of our world, where we live together with all the other living creatures. 

It is observed that in certain developed and developing countries, which are poisoning the world by carbon emissions day by day, works related with the creation/usage of “CO2 free” environment and/or technologies by strategies like “Green Campus”, “greening ICT” etc. are being accelerated in the recent years. Both as individuals as well as corporates and organizations, we must analyse to what extend we can decrease the CO2 emissions and do our part by developing strategies like Green Vision and Green IT, etc.

One of the fundamental aspects of these strategies shall be to change the habits of all individuals, in particular information professionals, in using technologies. By increasing information literacy, we must change our information seeking behaviours and thus re-create our “information consumption” habits. Knowing that each search we do on the internet, corresponds to a CO2 emission at the data center of the service provider, can be the first step of awareness. Each unnecessary and/or unconscious search done  on search engines generates               0,2g CO2; multiplication of this amount with billions every days  shows to what extend each IT user negatively contributes to the CO2 generation ( Google, n.d.). Knowing that the data centers, which are described as flueless information factories and which are positioned on the “cloud” day by day, have in reality huge “chimneys”, may help us in changing our information seeking habits.

We can directly contribute to the decrease of CO2 emissions by enhancing our information literacy competences and by developing efficient information seeking skills and thus by doing more accurate searches. In this way, information literacy can both allow us to use the tools more efficiently and can also contribute in less polluting the world.