Welcome to my ENV1101 blog! I am Sze Jie, a Year 1 Bachelor of Environmental Studies student. To begin, let me tell you some things about myself. One thing I truly cannot live without is music. I feel that music simply speaks to your soul like nothing else could. I also love travelling to beautiful places. A country I am truly in love with is Finland. It is a country of breathtaking scenery and genuine people. Finland allowed me to experience subzero temperatures as low as -30°C , see the moon up in the sky at 1pm, get free delicacies on a cruise ship for Christmas Day and above all, experience the Northern Lights. Given a chance, it is definitely a somewhere I want to go back to.
Alas, we are not here to talk about music or places. In this blog, I want to focus on something close to home, something we can’t seem to go a day without. The Internet.
Singapore has an Internet penetration rate of 84.5%, ranking 6th in the entire world. (Statista, 2019) I, and I believe that many of you probably also do, spend a lot of time on the Internet, whether we like it or not. We use it for school, for recreation, and for work. So yes, we use the Internet a lot, but have we ever thought about what enables us do this? The internet operates on a massive system largely invisible to us. It is hence easy for us to not realise that everything we do on the internet actually carries a carbon footprint.
It is only recently when I discovered the impacts of our daily Internet activities on the environment and so I thought that it might be something worth talking about. Therefore, in my blog, I aim to bring attention to the environmental costs, and perhaps also benefits, that arise from our Internet use. Stay tuned for my next blog post and until next time!
Sze Jie
References:
Doan, E. Z. (2019, August 21). Asia: Internet penetration by country 2019. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/281668/internet-penetration-in-southeast-asian-countries/