The costs of using social media are immense – not only for your own mental health and the culture of political debate, but also for the environment. In 2024, users worldwide spent 4.3 trillion hours per year on TiktokInstagram, Snapchat and other platforms. This consumed a total of 414 billion kilowatt hours of energy. This corresponds to 83 percent of the total annual electricity consumption in Germany.
Of course, social media use isn’t to blame for everything. And it only represents a portion of the resource consumption by smart devices that accommodate additional apps and that – along with their operating systems – have to be developed, manufactured, distributed and processed. Whether broken down into its individual components or added up – the ecological footprint of our digital everyday life is astonishingly large. Michael Klipphahn-Karge shows this in detail in his essay “Image Ecology”.
For example, there are the million-year-old metals and minerals that are extracted from the earth under severe environmental impact for the construction and operation of smartphones and then consumed in a very short space of time. Added to this are the digital infrastructures made up of undersea cables and data centers through which digital data is transferred in an energy-intensive manner, as well as the currently completely inadequate recycling of smartphones, which usually end up as electronic waste Poverty zones of the Global South be disposed of.
The materiality of digital images
The innovation cycles of digital devices, which are constantly accelerating due to the industry’s profit interests, also consume energy. The rebound effect here leads to more purchases being made precisely because of the technological increase in the efficiency of devices. Induction effects not only make you more advanced and more advanced as a consumer with a better cell phone camera up-to-date appear, they also tempt you to take more photos. This in turn requires more storage space in the clouds. And for them to function, data centers with gigantic energy consumption as well as an infrastructure made up of submarine cables that are extremely energy-intensive to produce are necessary.
What also interests Klipphahn-Karge is the materiality of digital images. By 2024, they accounted for over 90 percent of all photographs worldwide and were taken with smartphones, which are now used by two-thirds of the world’s population as the communication tool par excellence. 57,246 smartphone images are created worldwide every second. That amounts to around five billion photos per day, hundreds of millions of which are uploaded onto the Internet within a very short period of time. Overall, this also consumes an enormous amount of resources. Overall, digital infrastructures will be responsible for at least 14 percent of global emissions by 2040.
Michael Klipphahn-Karge: “Image Ecology”. Wagenbach Publishing House,
Berlin 2025. 80 pages,
12 Euro
Michael Klipphahn-Karge’s short essay is full of such calculations and numerical examples that illustrate and classify the environmental impact of digital image production. This is particularly useful because terms such as “software”, “cloud” or “stream” obscure the materiality of digital phenomena. However, there is also a tone running through the essay that fluctuates between clear-sighted social criticism and political resignation. One of the very few positive examples in the book is the EU directive on the “right to repair”, which is to be implemented nationally by 2026. For Klipphahn-Karge, the ecological catastrophe no longer seems to be avertable.