The very basic definition of waste is: Anything that is not useful. Your car is functioning, it is a product. The day it loses its functionality it turns into a waste.
In today’s time, internet holds around 1.2 million terabytes (one terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes) of data (source: Science Focus). And the more time we are spending in the internet, we are creating more data. We like and comment on 10 Facebook posts, we create some megabytes of data. We watch a YouTube video for 10 mins, we produce few more megabytes (MB) of data. And while reading this blog also you're producing some amount of data. A prediction by research group IDC states that the world will be creating 163 zettabytes (one trillion gigabytes) of data a year by 2025.
According to a research by DOMO, it is estimated that 1.7MB of data will be created every second for every person on earth by 2020. And the major countries leading this data production are United States, United Kingdom and China followed by Switzerland, South Korea, France, Canada and many more (source: Harvard Business Review). While writing this post also, I am creating a few more Kilobytes (KB) of data. We all are creating this data in the internet, and are hardly concerned about how it is stored. For you to access this post over the internet I need to store it somewhere; just the way you need to store a selfie in some folder of your device. And right now, this post is being stored somewhere in the United States and you're accessing it form your device.
The interesting part is, this post creates only a few kilobytes of data. But, when you will be reading it and sharing it to your friends & family over WhatsApp, Hike, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or any other internet platform, the net data this post will be responsible for, will exceed 1 megabyte, which is 100 or 1000 times more than the original size of this post. And the matter of fact is, this is not the only thing you're reading and sharing today.
The matter of concern is not this post or any other posts like this. The concern is about the billion posts, images, videos over the internet that are either fake or are nearly useless.
Ever thought why you open your waste-water pipes to the drains? Well, it is simply because there's no sufficient place to store it in the house. The same thing goes for the data over the internet. Storing this post in some Data Center for accessibility is called HOSTING; and it costs both Money and Technology. I could write about anything for the sake of a post that has no relativity with anything in this world or is totally useless, and the Data Centre would have stored it. But such posts would have been nothing else but an Internet Waste just as your last broken smartphone in your drawer.
Well you have only one broken smartphone so you don't need to worry about the space that it is occupying in your house. But what if you had 1,904,718,652 of such phones? You skipped the number, didn't you? Well it's too big to think about. More than 1.9 billion broken smartphones will definitely take up the whole space of your house and you'll need to buy another house. And that's exactly what this Data Center will have to do if there exists 1 billion posts like this. They will need to build another Data Center to store them. Well, the company has enough money and manpower to build the second, third or even the 10th Data Center to store our data (for example, this blog of mine) because people like me are paying them for this work. But, just because people like Bill Gates has the Money to buy 1000 houses, doesn't mean they'll will buy another 1000 houses when they already have one. So, the companies responsible for storing our data will prefer not having useless data instead of build more data centers.
Ever thought why Facebook is working so much on removing fake accounts? Facebook has thousands and millions of fake accounts and posts. Apart from spreading fake news, these fake accounts create huge amount of data that Facebook needs to store in its Data Centers. Well, Facebook could earn money from this data, couldn’t it? Most of these data are either fake or hardly useful to be turned into money. Rather than being social the 'fake account issue' is more of an economic problem, at least to Facebook.
Building a data center doesn't only require the two stuff that I mentioned above. It requires huge Land area, costly components, and some rare materials as well. So if I keep on writing 1 billion irrelevant stuff, it'll create the demand of new data centers, which in return will create demand of all the components it requires to be built. This can of course cause deforestation, heavy manufacturing resulting in air, soil and water pollution and deficiency of rare materials. So, ultimately, my 1 billion irrelevant blogs are internet waste or it can be said, it is causing internet pollution.
*Reducing internet pollution is our responsibility, Therefore give your contribution towards creating awareness and share this post.
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