Green movement in the digital age

Tuesday, 15 June 2010

by Simon Gear

The other day I sold a car. Well, not quite sold.  It stopped working and I asked a man to come and fix it for me. He took it away and informed me that I could either spend a large sum getting it back up to the point where it worked again, or I could sell it voetstoets to a mate of his for a wad of cash. Quite literally.

I had to drive round to the garage (in a car I had borrowed from my mother-in-law) and fetch a depressingly small brown paper bag full of notes. Once I had overcome the novel excitement of being payed in the same manner as our erstwhile chief of police, I got to thinking about this transaction.

This guy has driven to the bank. He’s withdrawn a decent sum of money, for which he has paid the bank a hassle fee of at least one of those notes. I’ve missioned over to fetch it from him and taken the bag, most probably back to the same bank, and deposited it into my account. The fetching and carrying part of this transaction alone has cost us the better part of an afternoon and the bank fees could easily have bought something with truffles in the recipe.

But none of this is as remarkable as the conversation that I had with my mechanic’s wife. When I suggested that an internet transfer of the money was probably the easiest for all concerned she casually admitted that neither their business, nor the guy that was buying the car was on ‘the email’. Nothing particularly remarkable about that. Most of the world doesn’t have the email. Hell, I was in my twenties before Wits finally hooked us all up.

And research has shown that even once you get people online, it takes about 5 years to build up the confidence in the internet to comfortably transact in most aspects of their lives. So being wary of internet banking is not exceptional, but not having any access to (or interest in) the digital world must mean a life curiously isolated from modern thought. Think about your life without Google.  True, we now have ways to waste time that hadn’t even been dreamt of a few years back, but at the same time we are aware of our place in a global society like never before.

The greenness of the digital age is debatable. Certainly we are now able to do things far more efficiently, offset largely by the fact that we now demand results instantly.  But being online also plugs you into the thoughts and opinions of a globe of fascinating people. In a hundred years, when we look back on what saved this planet, the answer is going to lie in information. Our ability to educate ourselves, work from home and maintain relationships will be at the heart of our response to our dwindling resources. And that means committing to being a part of the digital world. Oh. And before you ask? Facebook doesn’t count.