The purpose of this presentation is to illustrate the possibilities of the new community-oriented networking to advance sustainability in very wide sense: social, political and economic. The historical perspective tries to illustrate the great (and failed) expectations of the late revolutions of electronic communications during the last one and half century and especially the last quarter of century. The huge global challenges of have become evident also to those people who used to deny all the environmental and global changes and threats. That is why all the forces and means have to be joined to turn the development towards sustainability. Here we try to find the prospects in the global network.

The utopias have inspired both the engineers and the people benefiting from the new inventions. Especially the new communication means have brought great hope to change the societies into more open, democratic and equal direction. The improved methods for communication and interactions have inspired the pacifist and peace activists to foresee the prospects of peaceful world, as the conflicts and wars have been the result of bad communication and hitherto misunderstanding. The optimists were expecting already the early telegraph to make “wars unnecessary”, not to mention the more advanced communication means.

Also the backwardness, ignorance and deficiency of knowledge has been seen a result of “lack of information”, which can be cured by more or better information through mass or more personalised media. Huge expectation has been burdened onto broadcast radio and TV to help even the illiterate people to gain from the fruits of advanced information. When media has changed to more interactive especially during the internet era, the anticipation of active civil participation in social life has been great. (We do not here consider the percentage of global population with internet access and its distribution in the world.) The last years of more user community oriented internet use – so called Web 2.0 - has once again raised the hope for improved democracy, transparent business practises and more equal as well as more responsible communication. The question in this presentation is: Could this progress advance also sustainable development?

The expectations to promote more environmental and equal trends by advanced ICT have been immense during last decades. Even Soviet system wanted to steer the production and society by their socio-cybernetic systems efficient way. Newer utopias have included slogans as Nicholas Negroponte’s “Bits instead of Atoms”, “Communications instead of travelling”, “Electronic instead of printed media”, “Flexible work instead of offices”, not to mention “Paperless office“, which is handled in the other presentation of this event. More social echoes can be heard in “Global Village” or “Equal access to all” or “Participation instead of voting”. We have seen a massive increase in the information flow but unfortunately the atom flow has increased hand in hand with bit flow, need of office space (and office paper) has increased together with electronic communication. Despite of the improved energy efficiency per unit, the forecasts of energy consumption used for ICT infra and equipment show figures up to one third of all the electricity use in 2020 in USA, not to mention all the non-recycled electronic waste. Information content and means of access have skyrocketed, but not equally.

One of the most cited writers, Professor of Yale, Yochai Benkler (www.benkler.org) argues in his massive book “The Wealth of Networks” that a new economy is possible. Understanding human beings as selfish, utilitarian, rational agents leads to the economies, where laws of jungle benefit the small minority, and eat up the possibilities to more sustainable production, consumption and life-style. Benkler sees people behaving non-instrumental way, acting for gratification, appreciating social connections, targeting to self-esteem and capable to altruism. This should be evident for everybody – even for the old school economists.

In the network we have a huge number of examples that create value and benefit common good, but are produced on the voluntary basis. Some familiar examples are

• Open Source Software –movement which is challenging the whole way of software business quite successfully. Let us see how the 100 dollar laptop based on Open Source changes the way how the ICT is distributed and utilised in developing countries.
• Wikipedia -- and other free encyclopaedias. Wiki had five million articles last summer, and its trustworthiness rivals with the best commercially published encyclopaedias. Achievement is huge considering that writing formal articles and definitions is not a typical way of human expression.
• SETI@home project has attracted five million home computer owners to give the idle time of their processors and free space of their memory to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence from the white noise of electromagnetic radiation from space.
• Citizen Journalism/Media is challenging and complementing the traditional media. It is difficult to censor and control, which means more options in closed societies, and more points of view in open societies. ("BBC will pay for citizen journalism", 17 Nov 06)
• YouTube & and other network spaces had a remarkable impact on the last Congress election in USA:
• Network Petition can give a voice for the small person when fighting against wrongdoings and injustice.

CASE Tallink

Baltic Sea is one of the busiest sea routes of the world. The ferries crossing the narrow Gulf of Finland bring seven million passengers annually. The Gulf is merely a puddle. The sea is extremely vulnerable ecologically as the average depth is only 38 metres, less than the height of the big ship. Tallink is the leading Shipping Company in the Baltic Sea area. Last year the newspapers revealed that the Tallink ferries are dumping their waste water directly into the sea, although the harbours have proper facilities to deal with their septic tanks. The immediate response from the company was “not true”. Next day they had to admit, that they dump the waste water “but we purify it before dump”. Now the social media in the internet had condemned the ruthless behaviour of Tallink and published the boycott petition against the company. The campaign was extremely efficient. In one day tens of thousands people had signed the petition including the statement that they are not going to use the services of the company until the waste water is properly treated. The next day Tallink announced that it starts to empty the septic tanks of their ships in the harbours to be properly purified by the waste water treatment systems of the cities.

The second example is personally important to the author who was working in Nepal Telecommunications Corporation 1988-90.

CASE Kathmandu

During the first months of 1990 the so called “democracy movement” of Nepal including all the political parties came to public with the demand on new constitution and parliamentary democracy. The absolute ruler King Birendra did not give up and sent army against the peaceful demonstration of 200,000 people. The marching crowd was mowed down by heavy machine gun fire and hundreds of people lost their lives. After all, the King had to step down and accept the democratic constitution and constitutional monarchy. The situation was quite similar when the late Birendra’s brother, Gyanendra had sized the absolute power from parliament, democratic government and the parties in 2005. The new democracy movement in spring 2006 was even bigger than 16 years before. Now the cameras and mobile phones were everywhere and the palace did not dare to use the excess force to crush the resistance. The cellular network was turned off several times to hinder the organisation of demonstrations. It did not help, and the King had to hand over the power to the democracy movement, which is now drafting a republic constitution. In the whole conflict the total number of casualty was only 15, which was only a small fraction of the death toll of democracy movement of 1990. At least one reason to the difference is the power of communication: not the cruellest tyrant wishes to see the results of his brutal acts in the global TV-network or circulated by YouTube.

The early Internet was based on voluntary communities; business models are new, emerging from surprising directions, as Google shows. In addition to super-nodes (Yahoo, Google, MSN...), the current Internet sees the new communities in larger scale: search engines have made also the long tail visible. Social Media tools e.g. Technorati make millions of blogs visible to anybody. Users want to share their knowledge, achievements, opinions, experiences in all available ways. Creative Commons offers new ways for publishing, Citizen Journalism creates new transparency to the business and decision making, and design by customers provides a direct channel to the product development. In this process, how can we find the path to the more sustainable world?

When expanding, the market economy searches space for new products, and the media and advertisement apparatus has to create novel needs for people. The needs are connected to desirable lifestyles, which have globally turned more and more unsustainable. To change the direction of the trend, we need to redefine the needs. Classical example is the argumentation:

• I need a car.
• What for?
• To travel from a place to another.
• What for?
• To meet my colleagues and customers.
• What for?
• To have business meetings.
• What for?
• To negotiate about my contracts.

The (internet) communities could raise the issues that have significance in the market. Until now the car market has puffed off with horse powers, read: high energy consumption. When we are going towards the strict quotas of greenhouse gas emissions on every possible level of production and consumption, we will logically have personal quotas of emissions in the end. If we want to make the greenhouse gas market efficient, it cannot be only national and international level, but the individuals should gain advantages when not producing harmful substances. That will transfer wealth towards sustainable lifestyles, and create positive publicity for the people (or life-style) with lowest emissions.

The sustainable trends have to be promoted fashionable also in Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Bahasa Indonesia and all the other languages.

Symposium "Information Technology, Competitiveness and the Environment" in Helsinki, November 20, 2006
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