David Kreps
email: d.g.kreps@salford.ac.uk

The Time of our Lives: Understanding Irreversible Complex User Experiences

Keywords:

. Both these developments are looking at time in a new way, specifically at the irreversibility of many living processes, whilst simultaneously involving, including, and relying upon very scientific and computational data. The paper introduces a forthcoming research project with a UX company seeking to discover more.

Introduction

There has, historically, been a broadly positivist bias in Information Systems (IS) literature, [START_REF] Banville | Can the Field of MIS be disciplined?[END_REF][START_REF] Becker | Epistemological perspectives on IS research: a framework for analysing and systematizing epistemological assumptions Information[END_REF], [START_REF] Chen | A paradigmatic and methodological examination of information systems research from 1991 to 2001[END_REF], [START_REF] Galliers | A discipline for a stage? A Shakespearean reflection on the research plot and performance of the Information Systems field[END_REF][START_REF] Gallivan | Analysing IS Research Productivity: An inclusive approach to global IS scholarship[END_REF], [START_REF] Liu | An analysis of the AIS basket of top journals[END_REF][START_REF] Lyytinen | Why the old world cannot publish? Overcoming challenges in publishing high-impact IS research[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | Studying information technology in organisations: research approaches and assumptions Information Systems[END_REF], [START_REF] Paul | Challenges to Information Systems: Time to change[END_REF][START_REF] Paul | The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it: reflections on Bob Galliers' article, 'A discipline for a stage?[END_REF]. More recently, however, there has been something of a shift in the conceptualisation of success in information systems from a focus on technical factors to a focus on human factors [START_REF] Petter | The Past, Present, and Future of 'IS Success[END_REF]. One might usefully quote Ray Paul from his editorial piece in the European Journal of Information Systems in 2007, where he offered a definition of information systems and its relationship with information technology (IT) that reflects this shift:

 "The IS is not the IT and the formal processes being used.  The IS is not the people using the IT and the formal and informal processes  The IS is what emerges from the usage and adaptation of the IT and the formal and informal processes by all of its users." [START_REF] Paul | Challenges to Information Systems: Time to change[END_REF] IS research has evolved, then, from what might be deemed rather technologically determinist approaches, which investigate the effects of technologies on societies, to research which focuses on the human and the social [START_REF] De Vaujany | Information Technology Conceptualization: Respective Contributions of Sociology and Information Systems[END_REF], and addresses the increasing part technological artefacts play within the social. The positivist and interpretive methodologies used by various camps in the past, moreover, have increasingly become combined by IS researchers. Mixed methods approaches in IS, indeed, have a long pedigree, and have gained ground in both popularity and usage [START_REF] Heyvaert | Critical Appraisal of Mixed Methods Studies[END_REF][START_REF] Jacucci | Taking Complexity Seriously in IS Research[END_REF], [START_REF] Kaplan | Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Information Systems Research: A Case Study[END_REF].

In this paper, I wish to focus on two parallel developments. The first promises a much more profound theoretical basis upon which such mixed methodology and human usage can be studied. It has been growing over the last few decades in the worlds of environmental biology, chemistry, and other life sciences, and greatly ad-vanced by the introduction of powerful computing tools to their study: it is the science of complexity [START_REF] Goodwin | How the Leopard Changed its Spots New York[END_REF], [START_REF] Kauffman | At Home in the Universe Oxford[END_REF]21,[START_REF] Kreps | Bergson and Complexity Theory London[END_REF], [START_REF] Prigogine | Order out of Chaos[END_REF][START_REF] Prigogine | The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature New York: The Free Press[END_REF]. Some attention has been paid to this development, in the field of information systems, including a Special Issue in Information Technology and People in 2006 [START_REF] Benbya | Toward a complexity theory of information systems development Information[END_REF], [START_REF] Kallinikos | Complexity and information systems development: A comment on Benbya and McKelvey[END_REF] which included some internal debate. The second parallel development is the User Experience, (UX) approach that is rapidly superseding usability practice, responding to the legitimate business need to attend to the personal experiences of the human parts of information systems [START_REF] Vermeeren | User Experience Evaluation Methods: Current State and Development Needs[END_REF]. This is a popular area of focus for Human Factors scholars in IS.

Crucially, both developments are taking a new look at time, and the irreversibility of processes in systems that operate in far-from-equilibrium conditions: which includes all living systems. Irreversibility is proving to be the profoundest break from the traditional mechanical or reductionist tradition favoured by much of physics, mechanical dynamics, and the mindset of the hard sciences that prompted the positivist bias in IS for so much of its history as a field of enquiry.

As Paul said in his 2007 editorial, immediately following the above definition of IS. "Note therefore that the IS is constantly adapting to need as the users change their usage and the IT is updated or extended." [START_REF] Paul | Challenges to Information Systems: Time to change[END_REF] In other words, this paper seeks to stress, the IS is dynamic, subject to continual change -in ways even faster and more profound than perhaps Paul was implying in his editorial -and theoretical understandings and methodologies that incorporate this dynamism and the nature of its nonlinearity and irreversibility need to be explored and adopted by IS researchers.

So, this paper is about research towards achieving a better understanding of information systems as things which incorporate, rather than merely being used by humans, and what the impact of such a better understanding may be upon issues of design, usability, and success. The aim of the research is to find ways that might improve User Experience (UX), not simply by feeding these results back into a traditional requirements capture / design process, but towards the creation of learning systems that incorporate developers and end users in a continuous conversation with continually evolving information technology artefacts as the process language of that conversation.

I begin with a section outlining the most relevant ideas of complexity theory. I then move on to a consideration of the User Experience (UX) approach in web development businesses. I conclude with a brief review of the consideration of complexity in IS thus far, by way of an introduction to a research project due to begin with a UX small-medium sized enterprise (SME) in the North West of England, UK.

Complexity

Contemporary computational evolutionary biology has been one of the principle sites for the development of the sciences of complexity, in the latter part of the twentieth century. This development was greatly accelerated by the enormous advances in computing in the late 1980s and 1990s, and complexity science has spread to multiple sites and down multiple avenues, with the results disseminated from its multiple sources to equally multiple audiences during the 1990s and the first decade of the 21 st century. The work of Ilya Prigogine [START_REF] Prigogine | Order out of Chaos[END_REF][START_REF] Prigogine | The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature New York: The Free Press[END_REF], Brian Goodwin [START_REF] Goodwin | How the Leopard Changed its Spots New York[END_REF], and Stuart Kauffman [START_REF] Kauffman | At Home in the Universe Oxford[END_REF]21], among others, is a view of evolution from chemistry and biology, and yet reaching out far beyond it, challenging the reductionist neo-Darwinian orthodoxy of the likes of Richard Dawkins [START_REF] Dawkins | The Selfish Gene[END_REF], presenting a new understanding of evolutionary theory that places natural selection as a secondary, rather than primary force. The primary force behind evolution, for these complexity theorists, is selforganisation. For Kauffman, "Life and its evolution have always depended on the mutual embrace of spontaneous order and selection's crafting of that order" [START_REF] Kauffman | At Home in the Universe Oxford[END_REF]. Yet these insights into how patterns in the branching of evolution reveal a lawful ordering, how the complexity of teeming variety harbours principles of self-organisation, he also extends beyond the self-organisation of flora and fauna. "The natural history of life may harbour a new and unifying intellectual underpinning for our economic, cultural, and social life," he asserts [START_REF] Kauffman | At Home in the Universe Oxford[END_REF]. He suspects that "the fate of all complex adapting systems in the biosphere -from single cells to economies -is to evolve to a natural state between order and chaos, a grand compromise between structure and surprise." [START_REF] Kauffman | At Home in the Universe Oxford[END_REF]. One might say something very similar about most information systems.

Acknowledging the march of physics towards a final theory of everything, Kauffman nonetheless reminds us that though it may end up explaining how the building blocks of the universe operate, it "almost certainly will not predict in detail" [START_REF] Kauffman | At Home in the Universe Oxford[END_REF]. This failure to predict is down to two fundamental branches of physics itself: quantum mechanics, "which assures a fundamental indeterminism at the quantum level" with all its attendant macroscopic consequences, and chaos theory, neatly captured in the famous so-called 'butterfly effect' that can see the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Australia cause a Hurricane in the Atlantic [START_REF] Kauffman | At Home in the Universe Oxford[END_REF].

But not knowing the details does not preclude us from building theories that "seek to explain the generic properties" -for example, "when water freezes, one does not know where every water molecule is, but a lot can be said about your typical lump of ice." [START_REF] Kauffman | At Home in the Universe Oxford[END_REF]. Kauffman attempts to develop, through his work, "classes of properties of systems that ... are typical or generic and do not depend on the details" [START_REF] Kauffman | At Home in the Universe Oxford[END_REF]. Giving numerous examples, from the origin of life "as a collective emergent property of complex systems of chemicals" through to "the behaviour of coevolving species in ecosystems that generates small and large avalanches of extinction and speciation", Kauffman finds that the "order that emerges depends on robust and typical properties of the systems, not on the details of structure and function" [START_REF] Kauffman | At Home in the Universe Oxford[END_REF]. In this way the theory of complexity -and its attendant principles of self-organisation -is not tied to the world of biology, but capable of evincing patterns in all manner of complex adaptive systems -including information systems.

Complexity has been introduced and lauded as an important development in the social sciences, notably with Paul Cilliers', Complexity and Postmodernism [START_REF] Cilliers | Complexity and Postmodernism London[END_REF] and more recently a Special Issue of Theory, Culture and Society given over to consideration of the Complexity Turn in sociological thought [START_REF] Urry | The Complexity Turn[END_REF]. Cilliers lucidly points out a fundamental issue that must be grasped about complexity:

It is useful to distinguish between the notions of 'complex' and 'complicated'. If a systemdespite the fact that it may consist of a huge number of componentscan be given a complete description in terms of its individual constituents, such a system is merely complicated. Things like jumbo jets or computers are complicated. In a complex system on the other hand, the interaction among constituents of the system, and the interactions between the system and its environment, are of such a nature that the system as a whole cannot be fully understood by analysing its components. Moreover, these relationships are not fixed, but shift and change, often as a result of selforganisation. This can result in novel features, usually referred to in terms of emergent properties. The brain, natural language and social systems are complex. [START_REF] Cilliers | Complexity and Postmodernism London[END_REF] In other words, although the computer may be complicated, add human usage and the information system becomes complex.

There are important differences in approach that must be undertaken between studying something which is complicated, and something which is complex. The analytical method, whilst useful for complicated systems, is counterproductive when trying to understand complex systems. Complexity focuses on the shifting and evolving "intricate relationships" between components. "In 'cutting up' a system, the analytical method destroys what it seeks to understand." [START_REF] Cilliers | Complexity and Postmodernism London[END_REF] Furthermore, interactions are not restricted to being physical -they can also be described as a "transference of information" [START_REF] Cilliers | Complexity and Postmodernism London[END_REF]. These interactions are both rich -"any element in the system influences, and is influenced by, quite a few other ones", and non-linear -"small causes can have large results, and vice versa," [START_REF] Cilliers | Complexity and Postmodernism London[END_REF].

Most complex systems "are usually open systems, i.e. they interact with their environment." By contrast, "closed systems are usually merely complicated" [START_REF] Cilliers | Complexity and Postmodernism London[END_REF]. This is of crucial significance in environmental theory, where for much of the twentieth century -at least since Tansley [START_REF] Tansley | The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms[END_REF]-a nineteenth century organicist metaphor of natural equilibrium has been the defining characteristic of the term Tansley coined, 'ecosystem.' Yet, as many ecologists in the last decade or so of the twentieth century found through painstaking study (see [13]), the natural world in fact displays no such equilibrium at all, and the notion of ecosystems has undergone a radical rethink. As Cilliers notes, "Complex systems operate under conditions far from equilibrium. There has to be a constant flow of energy to maintain the organisation of the system and to ensure its survival. Equilibrium is another word for death." [START_REF] Cilliers | Complexity and Postmodernism London[END_REF].

Small causes, moreover, can include forces as weak as gravitational fields. Prigogine outlines how 'bifurcation points' arise when systems are pushed further and further from their stable equilibrium states, points where "an irreducible random element" enters the equation. There is no recourse to a "macroscopic equation" to "predict the path the system will take. Turning to a microscopic description will not help. There is also no distinction between left and right. We are faced with chance events very similar to the fall of dice," [START_REF] Prigogine | Order out of Chaos[END_REF]. Sometimes it is the environmental fields in which the system sits -such as the gravitational field of the earth -which seem to be the only influence that might tip the dice one way or the other. The results are the common -and otherwise unexplained -left-handed turns of the DNA helix and most seashells.

The essential point here is that pre-existing conditions cannot be used to predict outcomes. Bifurcation points can come in clusters producing landslides of change through which there is little or any hope of even deriving an outcome from a previous state. Yet -extraordinarily -when these bifurcated, far-from-equilibrium states are reached, spontaneous order seems to arise, stable and yet kept moving in the stream of dynamic forces that propel the system along. Prigogine coined the term 'dissipative structure' to describe systems that are sustained by the persistent dissipation of matter and energy. As Kauffman tells us, "in dissipative systems, the flux of matter and energy through the system is a driving force generating order," [START_REF] Kauffman | At Home in the Universe Oxford[END_REF]. The science of hydrodynamics has been very instructive here, and the image of a whirlpool of water at the plug-hole in a bathtub is a useful illustration. If the tap is left running, the whirlpool persists, bringing order to the constant flow of water. It is here, in this inherently unstable nonequilibrium, where, according to Kauffman, "life exists at the very edge of chaos" [START_REF] Kauffman | At Home in the Universe Oxford[END_REF]. Living cells are themselves "nonequilibrium dissipative structures", and the very nature of evolution -and especially of the coevolution of many systems, such as species in an environment -is to attain the "edge of chaos, a web of compromises where each species prospers as well as possible but where none can be sure if its best next step will set off a trickle or a landslide," [START_REF] Kauffman | At Home in the Universe Oxford[END_REF].

But as Cilliers is at pains to underline, for all this chaos and flux, these remain discernible systems, with pattern and order. As he asserts, "complex systems have a history. Not only do they evolve through time, but their past is co-responsible for their present behaviour," [START_REF] Cilliers | Complexity and Postmodernism London[END_REF]. Unlike merely complicated systems, susceptible to analysis, this order does not arise through the control of one part of the system over another, or the predictable unfolding of one state towards a resulting state. "Each element of the system is ignorant of the behaviour of the system as a whole, it responds only to information that is available to it locally. This point is vitally important. If each element 'knew' what was happening to the system as a whole, all of the complexity would have to be present in that element," [START_REF] Cilliers | Complexity and Postmodernism London[END_REF].

But as Kauffman asserts, the fundamental problem with reductionist, mechanistic thought, when applied to complex systems, is that to represent a complex system one must, of necessity, reproduce the system in its entirety. The representation, usually something like an algorithm -the "shortest description" which can capture the essential elements of a system -can only capture the entirety of a complex system, because a complex system is already its own shortest description. In computation this is known as an "incompressible algorithm," [START_REF] Kauffman | At Home in the Universe Oxford[END_REF].

Perhaps the most important aspect of all this, is the introduction into scientific thinking of the arrow of time -of processes which, unlike simple dynamics, and mechanical processes, cannot be reversed. As Prigogine enthuses in his book, Order out of Chaos, citing 19 th century thermodynamics as the beginning of such thinking, "far from being an illusion, irreversibility plays an essential role in nature and lies at the origin of most processes of self-organisation. We find ourselves in a world in which reversibility and determinism apply only to limiting, simple cases, while irreversibility and randomness are the rules……interest is shifting from substance to relation, to communication, to time," [START_REF] Prigogine | Order out of Chaos[END_REF].

User Experience (UX)

Turning our attention back to contemporary information systems, we find that standard industry usability practice has, in recent years, become downgraded, and finds itself distinguished from the more novel User Experience approaches, the former being conceived as either completely separate, or at the very best subsumed within the latter [START_REF] Law | Understanding, Scoping and Defining User eXperience: A Survey Approach[END_REF]. The key differentiation between these two approaches is in what is regarded as the far more subjective concerns of UX with look, feel, and satisfaction, in comparison to the more operational, concrete concerns of usability with task execu-tion times and clicks and error numbers. "A user's motivation and expectations play a much stronger role in UX than in traditional usability," [START_REF] Vermeeren | User Experience Evaluation Methods: Current State and Development Needs[END_REF].

Of course, mixed methodology is also crucial to UX. Mirroring the way in which information systems (as conceived, above, by Ray Paul) is, by nature, inevitably multi-disciplinary, calling as it must upon both sociology and computer science, the new approaches of UX, in addressing such human factors as satisfaction, cannot ignore the more numerical concerns of usability. But in the business world of web and app development, the realization has dawned upon those formerly wedded to the mathematical certainties of computer science that life just isn't like that. The retreat of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) from eXtensible Markup Language (XHTML) is a case in point. Paving the cowpaths, Hypertext Markup Language 5 (HTML5) walks where the real world has gone while the theoretical purity of XHTML was consigned to history. Equally illustrative is the failure of the semantic web, making room for the possibility of developments in cognition-as-a-service, whereby apps begin to make use of such Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools as Siri, Wolfram Alpha, etc, to provide a more human and interactive experience to the users of information systems [START_REF] Heide | Three reasons why the Semantic Web has failed[END_REF], [START_REF] Spivak | Why Cognition-as-a-Service is the next operating system battlefield Gi-gaOm[END_REF]. Matching the predictable, mechanical, certain equilibrium systems of our complicated machines, therefore, with the dynamic, far-from-equilibrium spontaneous order of living beings and our complex personal behaviour and social systems, is necessarily a very multi-disciplinary endeavour. The simple recognition that humans don't behave rationally is just the start [START_REF] March | A Premier on Decision Making[END_REF]. The IT artefact may be complicated, but the information system, open to its environment, driven by and incorporating rich information flows with potentialand often all-too-human -bifurcation avalanches, are complex.

With the development of UX in mind, then, it may be that the locating of academic IS departments in Business Schools is no mistake, for it is bottom-line business drivers that have shifted attention beyond mere usability practice to attend to the more subjective concerns of the personal experience of the usersor should I say, the human parts -of information systems, just as it is business concerns that left the computational purity of XHTML, Web Ontology Language (OWL) and Resource Description Framework (RDF) to the history books, in favour of HTML5, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), and apps with access to cloud-based 'intelligent' systems one can have a conversation with [START_REF] Spivak | Why Cognition-as-a-Service is the next operating system battlefield Gi-gaOm[END_REF]. The stress in Web 2.0 upon user-generated content was exemplary of how core the human part of contemporary information systems can be -and often is. In the context of what many are calling Web 3.0 and its world of multi-device, multi-channel and multi-directional throughput of information, information communication technologies (ICTs) are all the more clearly revolving around us, our information, our needs, and in real time: the web 3.0 that some are beginning to call, 'the Stream' [START_REF] Spivak | Why Cognition-as-a-Service is the next operating system battlefield Gi-gaOm[END_REF].

Here, the crucial break with the mechanical approaches of the past arrives with the realisation that these more experiential complex systems are most frequently not reversible. Time is an arrow in these instances and no amount of cookies, server-side accounts, or wish lists can make up for the loss of that most amorphous, context and moment-dependent quality of human behaviour upon which so many businesses depend: impulse. This is not even yet in the foothills, moreover, of that other crucial element of success in business: emotional intelligence. So in the field of UX, what has in the past been intellectually grasped as spatial, measured, and objective, is today by contrast increasingly being apprehended as durational, experiential, and subjective.

Further research

Now, complexity and information systems are certainly not strange bedfellows, and this paper is not the first to suggest a confluence. Following a Special Issue in Communications of the ACM (2005) there was another in Information Technology and People (ITP) on Complexity and IS in 2006. In their introductory paper to the ITP Special Issue, Jacucci, Hanseth and Lyytinen argue that complexity needs to be taken seriously in IS research [START_REF] Jacucci | Taking Complexity Seriously in IS Research[END_REF]. Benbya & McKelvey's core paper of this special issue, which we shall take as exemplary, inferred in the preamble that information systems development projects are complex not only because they deal with complex technological issues, "but also because of organisational factors beyond a project team's control." [START_REF] Benbya | Toward a complexity theory of information systems development Information[END_REF]. More substantively, the authors argued, Van Aardt [START_REF] Van Aardt | Open source software development as complex adaptive systems[END_REF] had asserted that any information system displays the characteristics of a complex adaptive system. Van Aardt concentrates on the emergence of order as opposed to causal predetermination, and the irreversibility of a system's history and unpredictability of its future. He focuses on open source software as the best example of IS as a complex adaptive system. Benbya & McKelvey, however, in their paper, go further, suggesting that all information systems act as complex adaptive systems [START_REF] Benbya | Toward a complexity theory of information systems development Information[END_REF]. But it is in a note by Kallinikos, another contributor to the ITP Special Issue, who furthers the debate with a critique of the Benbya & McKelvey paper [START_REF] Kallinikos | Complexity and information systems development: A comment on Benbya and McKelvey[END_REF], that my concerns with the meeting of complexity and information systems, thus far, are raised. Essentially, Kallinikos points to Benbya & McKelvey's continued embrace of what he describes as a "representational view of information and coding as mapping of an exogenous reality that is reflected on what we call 'user requirements,' considered both as independent and the starting point for coding," [START_REF] Kallinikos | Complexity and information systems development: A comment on Benbya and McKelvey[END_REF]. This, as Kallinikos asserts, "bypasses one of the major, contemporary sources of instability in organisations, which is no other than the changing organisational conditions (and user requirements) created by the very development of information systems themselves. In other words, the ghost is not simply outside but inside the house as well," [START_REF] Kallinikos | Complexity and information systems development: A comment on Benbya and McKelvey[END_REF]. The human parts of the information system, in short, cannot be abstracted from the information technology such that the IT project team can then safely proceed without them. Given the insights into complexity explored in this paper, it seems extraordinary that such a notion could be entertained. But how could it come about -how could IS scholars brave enough to embrace the ideas of complexity nonetheless find a way to cling on to the safety of the predictable and discrete? Herbert Simon's seminal paper from 1962 on the 'Architecture of Complexity', cited by both Benbya & McKelvey and by Kallinikos, includes the notion of near decomposability: the notion that complex systems have a hierarchical structure, that they are built up of inter-related subsystems, and that the intra-relationships within subsystems are stronger than the inter-relationships between components of different subsystems, such that the subsystems might easily be pried apart, and considered separately. For Simon, the distinction between a decomposable system and a nearly decomposable system is that in the latter "the interactions among the subsystems are weak, but not negligible." [START_REF] Simon | The Architecture of Complexity[END_REF]. Moreover, for Simon, in nature, systems where the hierarchy is interdependent, and which are therefore less decomposable, "are far rarer and less typical," [START_REF] Simon | The Architecture of Complexity[END_REF]. For Benbya & McKelvey it seems that the human and nonhuman 'subsystems' of an information system might be pried apart for the more predictable information technology project to get underway. For Kallinikos this notion is regarded as supportive of modular architecture wherein a "loose coupling of processes and agents" is enabled, [START_REF] Kallinikos | Complexity and information systems development: A comment on Benbya and McKelvey[END_REF]. Yet, as Agre points out, "hierarchy is a somewhat more diverse phenomenon than the universal ambitions of Simon's theory require," [START_REF] Agre | Hierarchy and History in Simon's 'Architecture of Complexity[END_REF]. Indeed the ambition of Simon to subsume everything under his notion of hierarchy manages to ignore a great variety of instances where the modular approach simply does not hold, and his argument is "a product of its time…: [the] high-water mark of the classical hierarchical organization" [START_REF] Agre | Hierarchy and History in Simon's 'Architecture of Complexity[END_REF].

Self-organisation, in fact -the favoured notion of the general systems theory of the time, and championed, as we have seen, by Prigogine and Kauffman, among othersturns out to be a much better description, certainly of the reality of contemporary information systems, than hierarchy. As Agre asserts, "Precisely because Simon's image of hierarchy is spatial, it does not fit well with the networked world, which collapses many types of distance," [START_REF] Agre | Hierarchy and History in Simon's 'Architecture of Complexity[END_REF]. A more durational view is required, and, as Cilliers [START_REF] Cilliers | Complexity and Postmodernism London[END_REF] reminds us, the intricate -and often sensitive -relationships between components, both within and between 'subsystems,' are oftenfor all that they may be considered 'weak'nonetheless the most important aspects of complex systems, capable of bringing both sweeping and fundamental changes.

In this paper I have tried to show that in fact, given the involvement of humans as parts of information systems -the ghost both outside and inside -the characteristics of complexity must inevitably apply to IS, and its aspects of irreversibility, its durational rather than spatial characteristics, are of growing significance. Success in today's information systems development, then, infers durational complexity, and though Benbya & McKelvey make a brave attempt at a framework for considering complexity in information systems, I consider that Kallinikos' criticisms -and my own -hold.

So what answers can I offer in a brief position paper for a conference? Well, the worlds of theory and practical application are sometimes difficult to bridge, but the opportunity is there to find in a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) between University of Salford and UX specialists Sigma Ltd, in the UK, which began in March 2014, real-world examples that may help to flesh out an understanding of how nonreversible experiences in information systems unfold, how they operate, what guidelines we might adopt in approaching their 'design', and how the experience of the human parts of those systems might be enhanced. The partnership will seek to explore how the concerns raised in this paper translate into concrete activities, with live clients and their digital presence, and what can be learnt from studying the data accrued by user research for future understanding of this mixed method approach, and, crucially, how the element of time and irreversibility impacts upon issues of design, usability, complexity, and success.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have tried to introduce IS scholars to what I believe may be the next step in the trend away from reductionist, mechanical positivism, through an interest in social and human studies, towards a more complex, and durational understanding of information systems, as exemplified by the approach of the User Experience professionals. The novel understandings of the sciences of complexity, giving us insight into the irreversibility of living systems, gives pause for thought when considering the processes most information systems incorporate. As Paul [START_REF] Paul | Challenges to Information Systems: Time to change[END_REF] stressed, information systems are "constantly adapting," and this continual adaptation -and the flexibility that it requires -needs to be built into our designs for the future.


Per Fors Thomas Taro Lennerfors
email: thomas.lennerfors@angstrom.uu.se

Jolanda Van Rooijen
email: jolanda.van.roijen@angstrom.uu.se

Sustainable ICT: A Critique from the Perspective of World Systems Theory

Even though the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) industry has historically been spared the critique of being environmentally unfriendly, society has as of late recognised the negative environmental effects of the ICT industry. However, such critique has been gradually replaced by the concept of Sustainable ICT, in which ICT is almost seen as a saviour, something with big potential of solving economic, societal and environmental issues. In this paper, our aim is to critically discuss the notion of Sustainable ICT by turning to an ecological perspective of World Systems Theory (WST). Immanuel Wallerstein, the main proponent of WST argues that the success of developed (core) countries today is a product of systematic unequal exchange of raw material, goods and labour with underdeveloped (peripheral) countries. Alf Hornborg, the Swedish Marxist ecologist, develops WST by focusing on the global distribution of environmental degradation. In this paper, we present Hornborg's ecological WST, we apply it to ICT by means of examples from the ICT Value Chain (from materials extraction to disposal) in order to illustrate the global distribution of environmental degradation. We argue that WST is a fruitful, and critical, alternative perspective to the more optimistic view of Sustainable ICT.

Introduction

Even though the ICT industry has historically been spared the critique of being environmentally unfriendly, society has as of late recognized the negative environmental effects of ICT industry. Reports have shown that almost 2% of the total greenhouse gas emissions worldwide occur due to the usage of ICT equipment [START_REF]SMART 2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy in the Information Age[END_REF], and the increasing number of large data centres consume considerable amounts of energy. Furthermore, the ICT sector is a growth sector, and it has been calculated that by 2020, the total GHG emissions from mobile data traffic might be three times higher than today [START_REF] Fehske | The global footprint of mobile communications: The ecological and economic perspective[END_REF], and that this will be a much larger problem than the energy intensive data centers in the future [START_REF]CEPT ECC PT1 International Report on Mobile Broadband Landscape[END_REF]. There are also several other environmental and social implications in connection with the ICT sector, such as the production of e-waste, the extraction of rare earth elements (REEs) and conflict minerals and the sometimes hazardous production of the equipment. The general perception within the field today is that even though ICT has a big negative impact on the environment, it has probably an even greater potential in improving the environment by mitigating the environmental impact of other emission processes such as production, agriculture and transportation [START_REF]SMART 2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy in the Information Age[END_REF]. One simple Internet search with keywords such as "ICT" and "environment" combined, will tell the same story. Smart ICT solutions will potentially be able to decrease the annual GHG emissions by 9,1 GtCO 2 e worldwide, as well as creating 29,5 million jobs and save USD 1,9 trillion for consumers and businesses [START_REF]SMART 2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy in the Information Age[END_REF]. Even though we agree that there are many positive aspects of ICT, we would like to apply a more critical perspective to the relationship between ICT and sustainability than that of Sustainable ICT.

In this paper, our aim is to critically discuss the notion of Sustainable ICT by turning to an ecological perspective of World Systems Theory [START_REF] Hornborg | Global ecology and unequal exchange: Fetishism in a zero-sum world[END_REF][START_REF] Hornborg | International trade and environmental justice: Toward a global political ecology[END_REF][START_REF] Hopkins | World-systems analysis: theory and methodology[END_REF]. By doing so, we want to open up a discussion about how Sustainable ICT and its predecessors contribute to ecological sustainability on a global scale. We argue that even though conditions in developed, core countries may be improved by the increased usage of sustainable ICT solutions, most of these improvements are made possible because of environmental and social degradation in peripheral, developing zones. Even though we do not claim this to be an entirely new insight, nor that we are able to prove that ecological effects of ICT are distributed unequally, we advance the claim that World Systems Theory is an important theoretical framework for discussing ICT, especially in the society of today where ICT is seen as one of many solutions to a range of economic, societal and environmental problems. A quite recent review of research on the environmental impact of ICT indeed confirms that a model-based approach is needed to allow "that positive effects can be promoted and negative ones alleviated proactively" [START_REF] Yi | A review of research on the environmental impact of ebusiness and ICT[END_REF]. World Systems Theory might be such model.

Outline of the paper

In the second part of the paper, we will discuss Sustainable ICT and World Systems Theory (WST), and its ecologically aware versions. In this part, we will also review how WST has been applied to studies of ICTs in the past. In the third part we discuss the ICT value chain from material extraction to disposal. We present a number of examples and tentatively analyse these examples from the point of view of WST. In the fourth part, we summarize our main findings.

Sustainable ICT and World Systems Theory

From Green Computing to Sustainable ICT

As we have stated in the introduction, ICT has historically been spared of critique of being environmentally unfriendly, although recently concerns about energy use cou-pled with the growing use of ICT, and the increasing production of e-waste have been raised [START_REF]SMART 2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy in the Information Age[END_REF][START_REF] Fehske | The global footprint of mobile communications: The ecological and economic perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Ruth | Green it more than a three percent solution?[END_REF]. Certainly, there are positive environmental aspects of ICT as well and we would like to think about the discourse of positive environmental aspects of ICT as consisting of three phases -Green Computing, Green IT, and Sustainable ICT.

In the 1990s, under the label of Green Computing, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched the voluntary program Energy Star, which is an energyefficiency certification for electronic devices, mainly seen on old CRT monitors. Several other similar concepts emerged during the same time period, emphasising energyefficiency as well as sustainable production and recycling of ICT equipment and other electronic devices (i.e. EPEAT, TCO certification). The focus in this phase was on the environmental aspects of the ICT devices in themselves. This was going to change.

In 2007, the discourse once again emphasised sustainable ICT practices, now under the concept of Green IT. Gartner Institutes launched a report in 2007, which showed that around 2% of the total energy consumption of Britain was due to the usage of ICT equipment. This was almost as much as the airline industry. Therefore, it became important to think about the greening of ICT. The difference between Green Computing and Green IT was that within Green IT, ICT was not only seen as the villain of the environmental issues, but more importantly a part of the solution [START_REF] Fors | Translating Green IT: The case of the Swedish Green IT Audit[END_REF]. The practices of Green Computing turned into greening of IT while the part of the concept where ICT could be the solution was called greening by IT. Greening of IT is thus not as focused on the ICT equipment, but rather focus on the beneficial potential of ICT applications Many argued that while Greening of IT did have some impact on sustainability, Greening by IT was even more important. The main argument presented was that while Greening of IT can only address 2% of the potential of Green IT, greening by IT could help streamlining other parts of the organisation by "smart" solutions, such as route planning, web meetings and virtualisation of servers, dematerialisation, in the remaining 98%. To sum up, the discourse on Green IT, although it started as a renewed concern with the amounts of energy consumed by ICT equipment (referring to the Gartner report), it got more and more focused on Greening by IT. It is plausible that a focus on Greening of IT, leads to further penetration of ICT into different societal sectors.

While the discussion of the positive impact of ICT was brought up by the discussion about Green IT from 2007, a burgeoning development, something we call the third wave in this field, is Sustainable ICT. In Sustainable ICT, economical and societal are added to the environmental concerns of green IT and green computing. Sustainable ICT focuses more on the "greening by" practices of green IT, while adding what IT can contribute with economically and socially. According to Harmond and Demirkan [START_REF] Harmon | The Next Wave of Sustainable IT[END_REF], this wave of sustainable computing will require organisations to consider "environmental (ecological and regulatory), social (ethical and philantropic) and economic strategies while delivering on core IT performance requirements to drive business productivity" [11, p. 19]. The same article argues that "sustainability has emerged as a business megatrend that fundamentally impacts how business compete" [11, p. 20].

During this whole development, a broadening of the scope has occurred, from the view of Green Computing, where we have to use ICT equipment more carefully and more efficiently, to Sustainable ICT, where ICT has a big potential of solving eco-nomic, societal and environmental issues. Above all, sustainability in general is described as a business strategy, used in order to gain market advantages. Yet another general direction in the development of the discourse on ICT is that it is turning increasingly optimistic.

World Systems theory

The idea of World Systems Theory was created during the 1970s as a way to develop the Marxian tradition of social studies [START_REF] Wallerstein | World-systems analysis: An introduction[END_REF]. The theory is mainly based on the ideas of Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. Rather than to discuss the class conflicts within a particular country, World Systems Theory discusses inequalities on a global level [START_REF] Chirot | World-system theory[END_REF]. The reason for this broadening of the scope is due to Rosa Luxemburg's important remark that capitalism cannot be contained in itself, but must expand geographically in order to survive and prosper [14, p. 36]. In other words, instead of addressing the exploitation of the working class by the capitalists, Wallerstein discusses exploitation by inventing two key concepts -the core and the periphery. The core is basically the developed, rich countries, while the periphery is the poor countries, receiving a disproportionately small portion of the global wealth. The main argument in World Systems Theory is that the core countries exploit the "underdeveloped" countries by placing them on the outer edges of global trade. Wallerstein argues that the success of developed countries today is a product of systematic unequal exchange of raw material, goods and labour with developing countries. The exploitation of the periphery, from the point of view of WST, started during the age of colonisation and still exists in terms of trade between core and peripheral countries that constantly favour the core. The prosperity of core zones is thus not possible without the exploitation of peripheral zones, according to Wallerstein, just as the capital accumulation process of production is not possible without the exploitation of labour power of the working class in a Marxian analysis. Apart from core and peripheral regions, there are also semi-peripheries that are not as privileged as the core zones, but also not as exploited as the peripheral zones. Wallerstein's analyses of world systems often revolve around economic and, as an extension of economic effects, social effects of the unequal exchange between the core and the periphery. Alf Hornborg, the Swedish Marxist ecologist, while being inspired by traditional WST, has developed WST in several ways. His focus is not only economic and social (addressing the economic relationship between the core and the periphery, and exploring its social effects), but more importantly environmental. In his analysis of world systems, the notion of emergy is vital [START_REF] Hornborg | The power of the machine: Global inequalities of economy, technology, and the environment[END_REF]. Emergy is a measure of how much energy that has been consumed in order to create a product or an organism. When natural resources such as coal, oil and iron are extracted from the earth, the contribution of the natural processes (i.e. geothermal processes) to the emergy value of the resources are often neglected. According to Odum and Arding [START_REF] Odum | Emergy analysis of shrimp mariculture in Ecuador[END_REF], the reason for this is because we see natural resources as "free gifts of nature" and misconceive their true value. The labour cost for extracting these resources are however being accounted for but, according to WST, at too low a price. The undervaluation of the price of natural resources, mainly extracted in peripheral areas, is one great contributor to why the core-periphery relation is still retained.

Not only are the natural resources unequally distributed by this relation, but also the environmental effects that the usage of these resources leads to. This is what Hornborg entitles the "global distribution of environmental degradation" [START_REF] Hornborg | The power of the machine: Global inequalities of economy, technology, and the environment[END_REF] and is his greatest contribution to the theory. This assumption is based on that our world is a closed material system, a zero-sum game, and not a cornucopian world where resources are unlimited. This means that improvements in one part of the world system is always offset by deterioration in other parts of the world system. When natural resources are used by the core to increase the standard of living in the developed parts of the world, the periphery suffers the environmental and social consequences. The unequal exchange of resources allows the core to afford extensive investments in ICT solutions ("accumulation of technomass"), making their organizations more economically efficient, while at the same time improving the work environment as well as lowering emissions of greenhouse gases directly from the core zones. This has some implications for sustainability and ICT, because the extensive usage of ICT in the core have social and environmental implications elsewhere, somewhere along the value chain of the required ICT equipment. Even though infotization is a major trend in world, world system theorists have been rather silent upon issues relating to ICT. There are however some important contributions, reviewed in the next section.

World Systems Theory and ICT

Konieczny [START_REF] Konieczny | The Internet and the world-system (s)[END_REF] argues that all early ICTs such as printing technologies, the telegraph, the telephone, radio and television were all invented, developed and deployed in the core, which means that the core "had decades if not centuries of near monopoly on their use" [16, p. 260]. He argues that the case of the Internet is not different. Beginning as a US military project, the Internet relies on expensive technology and skills that are hard to come by in the periphery. However, while there are WST inspired debates about the digital divide, there are also important positive effects identified by World Systems Theorists. While traditionally having been used mainly by Western core countries, the number of Chinese users is increasing dramatically. In mid-2004, English speakers constituted 36 percent of Internet users, while Chinese users constituted 13 percent. 5 years later, the English accounted for 28 percent of the Internet population, while the Chinese accounted for 23 percent. Konieczny thereby notes how the Internet indeed harbors potential for a more just and equitable use of information technologies.

Writing about the ICT equipment from a WST perspective, Nelson-Richards et al. [START_REF]Routledge International Handbook of World-Systems Analysis[END_REF] show how core countries invest heavily in ICT and that investments in ICT lead to higher productivity and business performance, which is to be expected. This displays that they are now knowledgeable of the productivity paradox of ICT, which would imply that the core distances itself from the periphery.

Lawrence [18] discusses the intersection between energy use and WST. There is a strong positive correlation between energy use and a country's position in the world system. The semi-periphery, such as China, uses more energy and produces more emissions, while the periphery has seen energy and emissions increase but to a lower extent than the semi-periphery. Even though high-technology equipment is mainly used in the core and semi-periphery, the lion's share of the production today have been moved to peripheral zones because of its hazardous nature and cheap labour and raw material. This is of course not only valid for the ICT industry but applies to many other industries such as the garment industry.

One the same topic, Frey [START_REF] Frey | The transfer of core-based hazardous production processes to the export processing zones of the periphery: The maquiladora centers of northern Mexico[END_REF] shows how health and environmental hazards are transferred to the periphery of the world system. Many governments in peripheral countries are willing to accept hazardous production processes and recycling of dangerous wastes such as ocean-going vessels, e-waste, and automobile batteries, in order to gain economic [START_REF] Buerk | Breaking Ships: How supertankers and cargo ships are dismantled on the shores of Bangladesh[END_REF] [START_REF] Frey | The transfer of core-based hazardous production processes to the export processing zones of the periphery: The maquiladora centers of northern Mexico[END_REF]. The economic earnings of these tradeoffs only affects a small portion of the peripheral country, i.e. those in power, while the negative effects affects the whole population.

Even though ICT is a fairly untouched area from a world systems analysis approach, several studies on environmental impact of ICT, in different stages of its value chain, have been carried out. In the next section, we are trying to present examples of unequal environmental exchange by the usage of ICT equipment.

The value chain of ICT

In this part, we are inspired by the value chain perspective on ICT hardware, meaning that we study ICT from materials extraction, to manufacturing, use, refurbish, reuse, and finally disposal. We believe that in order to apply WST, one must take a broad perspective on ICT. We know that there are several environmental implications throughout its value chain, including the extraction of scarce rare earth metals and dumping of electronic waste. We would like to consider these aspects in a geographical, political, social domain by turning to Alf Hornborg, and try to unravel where the positive aspects of IT are enjoyed and where the negative aspects of IT are situated geographically and why. This part does not aim to be a systematic analysis and a proof that ICT leads to the unequal distribution of environmental effects. Rather, it is a collection of some examples of practices in the ICT value chain that are aimed to give an idea of what a thorough application of WST to ICT could lead to. Thus, the aim of the part is to indicate how the most positive benefits of ICT appears in the core countries, while the more negative impact appears in peripheral countries.

Materials extraction

The production of ICT equipment depends on the supply of raw materials, and there has been a constant struggle to mine for many of these materials. Mining activities, including the extraction of materials needed to produce ICT are always linked to some kind of environmental destruction in the local environment. From a historical perspective, the mining for precious metals has caused severe damage to the landscape, with environmental consequences such as desertification, which is still present 2000 years after the original damage was caused [START_REF] Del Mar | A History of the Precious Metals, from the earliest times to the present[END_REF]. Del Mar argues that wealth in Europe during both the Roman Empire and 1000 years later during the Middle Ages, was made possible by the exploitation of labour and natural resources outside of Europe, such as the Spanish raid and quest for gold in Latin America [START_REF] Del Mar | A History of the Precious Metals, from the earliest times to the present[END_REF]. In today's terms we could argue that this can be compared with exploitation of Zambia by corporations such as Glencore, mining for copper [START_REF] Gulbrandsen | Stealing Africa -Why Poverty?[END_REF], the permanent radioactive land in Malaysia, or the mercury polluted land in Brazil due to mining. Large amounts of energy, either generated by muscular power or by combustion of fuel, are required in order to extract and crush and refine the metal ore. Processes like leaching uses highly toxic and/or cancerogenic chemicals such as fluor, mercury and arsenic. Large quantities of water for filtering are also used, which subsequently is deducted from the supply of available drinking water in the local area. Mining generates large amounts of waste, both useless rock that destroys the landscape visually, but also toxic waste that destroys the ecosystem. Extracting 1 ton of copper generates 600 tons of dangerous waste that somehow needs to be disposed of [START_REF] Gulbrandsen | Stealing Africa -Why Poverty?[END_REF].

Rare Earth Elements, (REEs) are the elements needed to give electrical products certain properties, and very small amounts are needed in the electrical gadgets people use in their daily lives. REEs make it possible to produce energy efficient fluorescent light bulbs and add power-saving abilities in certain technological devices. But the energy saved in the core is paid with a high environmental and social price in the peripheral zones [START_REF] Pitron | La sale guerre des terres rares[END_REF].

Conflict Minerals is another issue. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a large producer of minerals used to produce ICT equipment. As one of the poorest countries in the world, yet a rich country in natural resource, the income generated by exporting minerals supports military rebels. Mining and smelting of coltan and the "three T's": tin, tantalum and tungsten [START_REF] Eichstaedt | Consuming the Congo, war and conflict minerals in the world's deadliest place[END_REF] is often performed under slave-like conditions before transporting them to countries like China and India for production. Even though the core is aware of these conflicts, their dependency on coltan and other minerals for ICT products forces the core to turn the blind eye on the millions of death that mining directly or indirectly has caused in the periphery.

Manufacturing

The manufacturing of ICT equipment is linked with several social implications. Because this stage of the value chain requires a lot of manual labour, it is often outsourced to the periphery and the semi-periphery, due to the lack of regulation in these countries. What is less reflected upon is that the production phase is both very energy intensive as well as resource intense. Williams argues that the life cycle energy consumption of ICT equipment is dominated by production (81 %) as opposed to operation (19%) [START_REF] Rattle | Computing Our Way to Paradise?: The Role of Internet and Communication Technologies in Sustainable Consumption and Globalization[END_REF]. James and Hopkinson state in the same book that "it is ... the case that when all impacts are considered, the materials and manufacturing stage probably has the greatest environmental impact" [29, p. 41]. Studies on notebooks show that the production phase, accounting for about 56% (214 kg CO 2 e in 5 years) of the total greenhouse gas emissions of the total life cycle, casts a significantly higher impact than the use phase. Moreover, the environmental impacts of the production phase of a notebook are so high, that they cannot be compensated in realistic time-periods by energy efficiency gains in the use phase. In the case of a 10% increase in the energy efficiency of a new notebook as compared to the older one in the use phase, replacement of the older notebook can only be justified after 33 to 89 years, if other environmental concerns than just the energy part is considered [START_REF] Prakash | Timely replacement of a notebook under consideration of environmental aspects[END_REF].

The production of ICT components is very water and resource intense. A study shows that the total amount of secondary fossil fuel and chemical input to the production of a 2g 32MB DRAM chip is 1600 and 72g respectively. One of these small components also requires 32000 liters of water to produce [49]. While the size of chips decreases, the used materials might actually increase [START_REF] Rattle | Computing Our Way to Paradise?: The Role of Internet and Communication Technologies in Sustainable Consumption and Globalization[END_REF].

Furthermore, in the new report "CSR issues in the ICT hardware manufacturing sector", the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) focuses on an industry that has continuously moves to countries where production is cheaper, focusing predominantly on zones where labour rights and environmental issues have no to little priority. Research done for SOMO in China and the Philippines shows that computers are produced under endemic overtime, while the lack of unions and barriers to organizing means that the workers cannot negotiate for improvements. Workers are hired on short term contracts for years, blacklisted and subjected to discriminatory application processes [START_REF] Rattle | Computing Our Way to Paradise?: The Role of Internet and Communication Technologies in Sustainable Consumption and Globalization[END_REF].

Use

The use phase is where we can reap the benefits of ICT practices, according to recent reports [START_REF]SMART 2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy in the Information Age[END_REF][START_REF] Gartner | The Data Center Power and Cooling Challenge[END_REF]. While there are some obvious advantages in economic sustainability in the use phase, whether this phase can contribute to ecological sustainability globally is contentious. While some argue that ICT in the form of web meetings generates less need to travel and meet physically, others have argued that the number of physical meetings does not decrease [START_REF] Rattle | Computing Our Way to Paradise?: The Role of Internet and Communication Technologies in Sustainable Consumption and Globalization[END_REF].

It has been suggested that around 80% of energy consumption of PCs is in the production phase, as mentioned in the last section. However, a 2007 EU study by IVF reached the opposite. Their methodology suggests that 65% of the lifetime global warming impacts of a European office desktop computer are related to use the use phase, compared to 32% in production. The main reason for this is that although LCD monitors are lighter than CRTs, require less energy and resources in production, the latter can result in emissions of sulphur hexafluoride (SF 6 ) or nitrogen trifluoride (NF 3 ), which are very potent and long-lived greenhouse gases.

Kawamoto measured total energy use by office and network equipment as of 1999, which amounted to 2% of the total electricity in the US [START_REF] Rattle | Computing Our Way to Paradise?: The Role of Internet and Communication Technologies in Sustainable Consumption and Globalization[END_REF]. Koomey shows that electricity consumption of Internet servers doubled in the period 2000-2005 [START_REF] Kostigen | The Underbelly of Globalization: Our Toxic Wastes Exported to Developing Countries[END_REF]. Mills and Huber suggest that Internet absorbs some 8% of the total US electricity supply [32 p. 81].

3.4

Refurbish and reuse

Some refurbishers of computers in Sweden have found a niche market in prolonging the life of computers by selling them second-hand to semi-peripheral countries before they actually become waste. The refurbisher refreshes software, tests batteries, erases hard drives and exchanges keyboards to fit the export market within the EU. They mainly sell proper second hand computers to former East Block countries. In Sweden the demand for second hand ICT equipment is very limited. Even though formal EU rules on e-waste recycling are the same, the likelihood for a machine to be fully recycled after its second life is far reduced in former East Block countries, since Sweden currently has the highest EU recycling rate in kilogram per person. Thus even though this is a fully legal operation, the risk for these machines not being recycled properly might increase by this step. On the other hand refurbishing is doubling the lifetime of the machine that delays production.

Disposal

The Basil Action Network (BAN) also estimates that Western electronic waste, primarily from the United States and the United Kingdom, is illegally exported to different countries in Southeast Asia and Africa. In 2005 BAN estimated that 275.000 tons of e-waste was being shipped to someone else's "backyard" [START_REF] Sonhüter | Nie mehr Müll -Leben ohne Abfall[END_REF]. This waste is not treated in any proper way and basically motherboards are melted over open fires releasing mercury fumes and dioxins of flame-retardants in order to extract precious metals such as gold and silver. Similar treatment is done with cables in order to extract copper.

The authors of Cradle to Cradle [32 p. 5] mention that copper waste ending up in regular household stream which end up in incinerating plants is getting melted into asphalt to a value of £80 million. Braungart claims that 15.000 tons of copper is being smelted into asphalt in Germany every year and thus being lost as a value resource that potentially could be fully recycled. The throwaway society in the core thus demands a continuation of supply from the periphery.

Summary

What could be indicated and what would also be the normative conclusions from WST in most of these examples is that most of the negative impacts of ICT along its value chain are displaced to peripheral zones. In the examples above, one can deduce that significant negative environmental impact is attributed in resource extraction, which is highly energy consuming, changes the natural environment, and is also detrimental to human well-being for the employees as well as for the local community. A part of electronic waste is also exported to peripheral regions such as parts of China, and Africa. The exported electronic waste has less economic value than the electronic waste that is recycled within the core areas such as the European Union. Rather, the electronic waste exported is that which requires low labour costs to process, such as cables, often burned outside in empty barrels, sometimes by children.

Certainly peripheral areas also use ICT equipment, but it is probable that the ICT equipment used in these areas are not the newest nor best, but more often intermediate technology [51]. Peripheral areas do not benefit from ICT in the same ways as core regions, because of the constant race for speed and efficiency in this sector. Rather, peripheral areas presumably suffer from slow equipment and slow networks.

Manufacturing is often located in semi-peripheral regions, such as parts of China and India. Manufacturing is also an energy demanding and chemical intensive process. There have also been reports that the local environment is polluted to a large extent. Due to the fact that semi-peripheral regions are richer than peripheral regions, these regions probably enjoy more positive impacts of ICT than peripheral regions. However, the main benefits from ICT is expected to happen in core regions, where the newest smart systems and the latest gadgets are used. Hence, environmental issues boils down to energy issues only, which is indicated in for example Sustainable ICT literature (produced in the core), which is always almost exclusively focused on energy [START_REF] Yotsumoto | The current trends and issues of Green IT, The Japan Association for Management Information (JASMIN) Conference[END_REF].

Conclusions

In this paper, we have presented the emergence of the IT trend Sustainable ICT and the claim that ICT can be a driving force in promoting a sustainable society. Moving from Green Computing to Green IT to Sustainable ICT, we have argued that the focus on the environmental effects of ICT is getting more and more positive. Green Computing emphasised reduction of energy use of ICT as well as more sustainable production of ICT. Green IT, with its bifurcation into Greening of IT and Greening by IT, can be said to both subsume Green Computing into Greening of IT, while also opening up for a more positive perspective of ICT with the concept of Greening by IT. At the same time, in the popular discourse, more attention is given to Greening by IT, that is, the positive perspective. Sustainable ICT broadens the perspective to not only environmental but also social and economic issues. Still, there is a focus on the positive aspects of ICT. If the discourse is analyzed from the perspective of Alf Hornborg, it is obvious that the discourse is one of cornucopia. ICT can, in this cornucopian view, solve a range of social issues, and the increasing penetration of ICT into various societal sectors is both desirable, and more importantly, possible. In contrast to this optimistic view, we have presented WST, which argues that the discourse of cornucopia cannot be true. Rather, there is always a zero-sum game: if someone wins, someone must lose. We have reviewed WST, especially its ecological versions, and applied that to the ICT value chain. Thus, we have indicated how WST can be used to throw light on inequalities in the value chain, for example that core regions benefit most from the use of ICT while negative environmental impacts of ICT befalls peripheral regions. We have also brought up examples that problematize the strong focus on energy efficiency. Rather, one should also think about other environmental aspects of ICT.

Although we have drawn on WST in this paper, we do not unconditionally believe that it is correct. Rather, what we have been trying to do is to introduce an alternative, or minor, discourse to the one-sided discourse that is being promoted by dominant actors in the industry (such as large companies). When discussing the sustainability of ICT, one should thus consider both the arguments from the discourses of cornucopia and zero-sum game.

  Smith, Sonnenfeld and Pellow [19] are portraying the negative environmental and social effects of the production of the latest high-tech gadgets. They focus on the US and on the emergence of the high-tech industry in what was going to become the Silicon Valley in the 1980s. Sonnenfeld argues in the same book that "[h]ierarchies of power, profitability, and control are embedded within the structure of global economics. Key firms such as Intel and Hewlett-Packard remain headquartered in Silicon Valley, even while their manufacturing operations are distributed around the world." [19, p. 13].