This interactive feature, "How Sustainable Is Your Cell Phone?" lets the user explore two halves of the screen, each with a model of a cell phone. On the right, you can explore the inner components of today's cell phones, and then link to existing Guardian articles on the often toxic sites where raw materials are mined (and the atrocious working conditions of miners, for example, in the Congo, which is straight out of Conrad.)
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| The main screen for "How Sustainable Is Your Cell Phone" -- Negatives / Positives Explored |
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| The innovative interface lets you select a part of a cell phone and find out the story behind the materials / manufacturing. (It isn't a pretty story.) |
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| The copper in a cell phone comes from Chile, where there are significant human and environmental costs to the extraction of this common mineral. |
I used this interactive feature with my LIB 200 class. (This year, they aren't the most motivated of students. I've been scaling back what we can cover, and how much.) But they were interested in this particular model on 'e-waste,' and this intuitive and grabbing interface to get the reader to some of the background behind our miraculous devices is a clever approach to get readers to existing facts-on-the-ground.
Limitations? Well, this might be expanded to included non-Guardian coverage, say by the journalists at The New York Times on the harsh conditions in Foxconn (Apple's offshore manufacturer of its devices, among many other American companies). Just this week, Apple met its investors' expectations for profit, and it does this in part by not paying its low-level employees very much at all.
The other missing piece is the problem of e-waste, which The Guardian has covered in several recent articles. (Chances are reading this piece 'The World's Largest E-Waste Dump" will not leave you in a good mood.) But I guess this e-waste profiled in that piece wasn't specifically from cell phones, so this is not linked, or they felt this didn't fit.
I am beginning to see more and more that the job of 21st-century journalists is to get readers to 'see' facts and problems that are right in front of us. Visualizations are one important way to do this. Obviously, as educators we need to do the same thing to get our students to think critically about global (and local) problems....
