Tipo de cáncer

Introduction

In early 2016, the Heart of England charity announced a partnership with the UK chat application Tengi, a relative newcomer to the mobile chat scene. As an incentive to use the app, Tengi entered its users in weekly and monthly prize raffles.⁶² Winners of cash prizes could choose to donate their earnings to the charity, with every £5 planting a tree in Dorsington Wood. Reporting on the first few weeks of the initiative, a blog post on the charity’s website exclaimed that ‘the partnership had already put 250 trees in the ground!’ (Woodgate 2016, author’s emphasis). Celebrated by the charity as ‘the app that plants trees’ (ibid.), Tengi is one of a number of attempts by companies since the late 2000s to integrate virtual activities into planting projects. Some, like Tengi (as reported on Facebook, 2/Dec/2016), were constrained by funding and relatively short-lived.

Others, like the game series Tree Planet, which emerged in 2010, have been ongoing for several years. The kinds of actions users are asked to engage in are simple, and often interactive. They may involve clicks or watching ads, playing games or donating money through an app. For ease of discussion, when referring to these actions in general, I call them virtual planting activities, or VPAs.

In this section, I provide an overview of the various types of VPAs, using a few of the examples I draw on later in my thematic analysis of seventeen campaigns’ promotion of care for the environment through internet and mobile applications, digital games, and online crowdfunding initiatives. This analysis is roughly organised along these categories of participation, as promotions for similar types of VPAs tend to revolve around similar themes. The discourses circulated in relation to different VPAs nevertheless converge in their espousal that planting and care are amenable, at least in part, to low cost and simple actions. Following the overview of VPAs, I summarise and subsequently detail the main arteries of promotion based on this proposition. I conclude by reflecting on the prospect of VPAs as mediators of making time for planting and learning to care about the environment and trees.

62 https://www.groundreport.com/tengi-announces-national-launch-new-messaging-app-gives-back/, last accessed April 2018.

Virtual planting activities (VPAs): an overview

The simplest type of virtual action is clicking to plant trees, similar to clicking to support e-petitions on the Care2.com site discussed in Chapter 1. On the website for Brother Earth, a campaign run by the office supplies company Brother, users can ‘Click for the Earth’ by clicking once daily to donate to a tree planting project.

Figure 25 ‘Click for Earth’ process Source: Brother Earth Website⁶³

63 http://www.brotherearth.com/en/top.html, last accessed February 2018. The process is shown horizontally on the webpage. I have re-presented it vertically to facilitate reading.

By clicking, the topmost graphic suggests, users enter into a partnership with Brother (symbolised by the handshake) that signifies their love (suggested by the heart) for the environment. This partnership, the third step reveals, honours a commitment to forest conservation. All that is required of users is a meagre investment of time, i.e. the few seconds it takes to load the webpage and click ‘Donate’, and of money, i.e. 1 yen, or 0.01 USD.

The promise of saving time and money is repeated in a number of campaigns that promote free apps meant to slot into users’ pre-existing routines. The search engine Ecosia is a good example. In addition to navigating to Ecosia’s website (www.ecosia.org) to perform a search, users can download the app onto their smartphones, install the Ecosia browser plug-in for Firefox or Chrome, or use one of 16 alternative browsers that feature Ecosia as a search option (Ecosia, Knowledge Base, ‘Other browsers’). Ecosia’s

operational infrastructure is largely supported by Bing and Yahoo, which also generate its ads. As a result, Ecosia has been referred to as essentially a ‘skin for a system powered by Bing and Yahoo’ (Henley 2013), ‘enhanced’ with some of its own algorithms (Fischetti 2015). Despite being backed by these corporate giants, Ecosia makes assurances regarding users’ privacy, promising, for instance, to respect the ‘Do Not Track’

preference of users’ browser settings and to refrain from using ‘services like Google Analytics or social media trackers that expose your data activity on Ecosia Search to third parties’ (Ecosia Website, Privacy).

Like other search engines, though, Ecosia generates revenue from advertising. For each click on a sponsored ad from the search results page, a user contributes 0.5 cents (Euros) to the company’s tree planting fund, with an average of 45 clicks planting a tree (Ecosia, Knowledge Base, ‘Personal counter’). A counter in the upper right corner of the search page indicates the number of trees that users’ searches have helped plant through the Belgian non-governmental organisation WeForest. The company has planted over 32 million trees to date (Ecosia Website).

Figure 26 Ecosia tree tally Source: My computer (Apr/2016)

Forest (www.forestapp.cc) is another app for browsers and smartphones. It rewards users with a virtual tree for every 30 minutes they do not disturb their phone or browser. The interval for focus can be set from 10 to 120 minutes. Each interval awards users with a set number of coins, which I found does not vary proportionately. For instance, 55 minutes will give a user 15 coins, while 60 will give them 21, and 65, 22. In the premium version, which can be purchased for 1.99 USD, users can put these coins toward planting real trees. However, 2500 coins are required for each tree, which in my experience equates to 350 30-minute sessions. Despite this time commitment, users have helped plant over 287,135 trees (Forest Website).

Undoubtedly the most common approach to VPAs has been gaming. Some games are unsophisticated in their design, requiring players, for instance, to blast bubbles in terrestrial and outer space environments (see below, Figure 27).

Figure 27 DreamScape game screenshot Source: DreamScape, Facebook (1/Jul/2010)⁶⁴

Planting a tree in such cases is often tied to actions like installing the game on one’s electronic device and in-game accomplishments. DreamScape, for instance, promised to plant 10 trees in honour of the 10 highest scores each day.⁶⁵

A greater number of games have adopted a more sophisticated narrative form of play. These games are commonly referred to as ‘Serious Games’, or ‘Serious Fun’, a genre of digital games created for the purpose of ‘addressing real world problems’

(Sandbrook, Adams, and Moteferri 2015, 118). Nicole Lazzaro, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of XEOPlay, the company behind the iOS gaming app Tilt World (www.tiltworld.com), explains that the premise of serious fun is to turn the time that individuals spend engaged with apps into ‘fuel [for] solving the world’s problems’

(Lazzaro 2012b), with the hope that this time will also help raise awareness about social and environmental issues. Tilt World, for example, which was released in 2010, is marketed as ‘an educational game about carbon & the environment’ (Twitter, 11/Mar/2012) with a concrete impact.

64

https://www.facebook.com/DreamScapeGame/photos/a.138857669463938.25117.137314 509618254/138859249463780/?type=3&theater, last accessed July 2018.

65 https://www.facebook.com/pg/DreamScapeGame/about/?ref=page_internal, last accessed July 2018.

Figure 28 Making a real world impact Source: Tilt World, Facebook

The object of the game is to help Flip, a tadpole, ‘catch seeds to restore the sunshine to Shady Glen’ (Tilt World Website), alongside vanquishing other ecological nemeses, such as toxins in the soil (Tilt World Website, game info). The points generated through play go toward funding reforestation in Madagascar through a partnership with WeForest. So far, over 16,000 trees have been planted (Facebook, 22/Apr/2014).

Figure 29 Tilt World gameplay Source: My phone (Mar/2016)

The third type of game that has been used to plant trees aims to tilt the balance of entertainment and learning toward the latter. JohnnyAppl was a web-based app that ran during 2014 and 2015 and involved answering trivia questions on a plethora of topics that

players could choose from, from animals to environments to countries. Below is a screenshot of a sample quiz question.

Figure 30 Sample quiz question Source: JohnnyAppl, Indiegogo

Between 100 and 150 correct answers were needed to plant a tree (e-mail communication with Anthony Doos, member of game development team, 25/Mar/2016). In total, the game donated 593 USD to Eden Reforestation Projects, resulting in 5,930 trees planted.⁶⁶

The final type of VPA occurs through specialised apps and sites for grassroots crowdfunding. 1 Heart 1 Tree (1H1T) is an example of a crowdfunding app. Trees

planted through the app go to one of seven ‘reforestation programs’ in Australia, Peru, the Ivory Coast, India, France, Senegal, and Brazil (1H1T Website). Users have a choice of donating a single tree or multiple trees, each costing 10 euros. To plant a tree, users place the tip of a finger on their phone’s camera sensor as the app proceeds to ‘take’ the user’s pulse, generating a neon green readout like that displayed on heart rate monitors. (In my experience, a readout is generated regardless of whether users follow this instruction.) The pulse line then morphs into the appearance of a tree.

66 http://www.edenprojects.org/johnnyappl, last accessed April 2016.

Figure 31 1H1T app readout Source: My phone (Feb/2016) Users can choose to identify themselves as the donor, plant the tree in honour of a

particular person, and write an accompanying dedication. So far, the app has funded 55,000 plantings.

In contrast to 1H1T, Tree-Nation (info.tree-nation.com) is a crowdfunding

initiative that takes the form of a specialty platform. It is essentially a networking site that facilitates fundraising and communication between planters, companies, organisations, and individuals. Starting a project is free. The platform has over 100,000 active users, involvement from over 300 companies, and has helped plant more than four million trees (Tree-Nation Website, Projects). Each planting project has a dedicated page, furnishing basic information about the project (i.e. location, planting goals, purpose, benefits). To plant trees, individuals click on a project they want to help fund and, when applicable, select from among the available tree species. Another option is to become a ‘Serial Planter’ by committing 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 euros monthly to Tree-Nation, which then distributes the funds to various registered projects. A free planting option is also

available. Each week, registered users receive a seed, to which they must then add content. Other users water the seed based on whether they like the posted content. To plant a tree this way, the seed must receive 100 water drops within 5 days (Tree-Nation Website, Let’s Plant).

Virtual planting as eco-ethical engagement

As this brief overview of VPAs demonstrates, an array of options is available to individuals who wish to get involved without expending sizeable sums of money, time, or effort. This lack of investment is a recurrent theme in many campaigns for VPAs

requiring little user input or sustained attention. In this regard, the hyped advantages of VPAs parallel precisely ‘the priorities of efficiency, functionality, and speed’ (Crary 2013, 88) that distinguish contemporary societies wherein the adoption of digital

technology is profuse. Ben Agger proposes understanding the resultant digital mediation of ordinary life in terms of ‘iTime’, a name he uses to designate the temporal organisation of everyday life by the thoroughgoing dependency on smartphones, laptops, and other computing devices (Agger 2011, 120–21).⁶⁷

Societies in which iTime is the norm are, to be sure, the very ones that target app users are members of. In the first section below, Repurposing personal time for

environmental benefit, I consider how VPAs’ attempt to repurpose users’ personal time to care for the environment, both valorises the conditions that breed iTime and fails to account for the material and ecological costs that enable them. I argue that making time for environmental care must contend with time as not only a quantity consumed, but as importantly, a quality of engagement.

Thinking through this point, the second section, Learning to care through play, turns to VPAs that are premised on making the time spent in-app additionally valuable for orienting user attention to environmental concerns. Here, I focus on games and their assurances of learning about trees and deforestation while having fun. I focus especially on the notion of making a real world impact, and its grounding in anthropomorphic renditions of trees and mechanical portraits of deforestation. I suggest that greater attention to ecological details and context, along with experimentation with less human-like characters, would make for more eco-ethically enlightening, if more compelling, gameplay.

The final section, Collective caring about deforestation and climate change, foregrounds the situation of users contributing individually, while implicitly acting as part of a larger whole, thereby bringing about changes that would not be possible alone.

Crowdfunding sites and apps are the focus of this section, though, as with the other

67 iTime is a play on Apple’s signature naming of its product lines (e.g. iPad, iPod, iPhone, iMac) and a suggestion of the popularity of this computing brand among digital users.

sections, I refer to campaigns for other VPAs when relevant. I critique discourses on collectivity and solidarity, showing how these seduce rhetorically through celebrity backing, scientific statistics, and unifying language, to construct a vision of enacting large-scale reforestation in a compacted timeframe. In the end, though, these discourses envision a common future that is selective in whom and what it cares for, neglecting non-trivial inter-human and inter-societal differences.

Repurposing personal time for environmental benefit

Many companies claim that VPAs create a coincidence of personal time (time spent for oneself) and environmental time (time spent for the environment) in a way that contributes to the flourishing of both user and environment. In this section, I antagonise this claim, probing whether this coincidence admits time for ecological care. I take issue in particular with a key selling point of VPAs concerning how seemingly effortless planting becomes, as one article notes of Ecosia, ‘almost TOO easy’ (L. White 2015, author’s emphasis). Tracing how this point is strung across discourses stressing the convenience, inexpensiveness, and efficiency of virtual planting, I highlight tensions in how making time for virtual planting is conceived, based on the material, ecological, and ethical challenges that arise from exploiting this time within a framework of (digital) consumer choice.

Inexpensive and easy

The convenience and trivial costs of participation receive prominent mention in the campaigns. A user review of Ecosia effuses in disbelief, ‘I found that the results i got when i searched were virtually the same as google AND IT PLANTS TREES AT NO EXPENSE OF [sic] THE USER!!!!!!!!’ (iTunes, 24/Aug/2014). Coupled with low or no pecuniary investment, individuals are assured, virtual planting is also a cinch. Anthony Doos, the game interface designer for JohnnyAppl, is quoted as saying: ‘I believe people fundamentally want to save the planet, but only if it doesn’t cost them anything’ (Doos, quoted in Studer 2015). The company assures prospective players that digital planting is much easier compared to its physical counterpart, reaching out to fans: ‘Want to help plant trees right now? Today we’re planting trees every time ten people click ‘Like’

above! Way easier than digging, right?’ (JohnnyAppl, Facebook, 27/Jan/2014).

This construal of virtual planting recalls the impressive outcome that the Heart of England charity claimed as a result of its partnership with Tengi, i.e. the automatic conversion of a digital action into a sapling. The overall discursive importance attributed

to this outcome sets up a partial relation between the virtual and the material, which is nicely captured by a visual equation featured on one company’s Facebook feed:

Figure 32 Converting between the virtual and the material Source: Ecoviate, Facebook (19/May/2015)⁶⁸ It is as though, ecologically speaking, using the app only plants trees, as a writer for Scientific American reinforces: ‘Highly abstract tasks, like searching the Web, can lead to something as tangible as a new tree’ (Fischetti 2015). This selective view of the

interactions between virtual and material infrastructures is reminiscent of the choice of

‘cloud’ terminology to refer to file transfer and storage services such as Google Drive and Dropbox. As Allison Carruth emphasises in her analysis of ecological imagery associated with ‘digital technology and networked computing’, the immaterial evocations of the cloud ‘masks . . . what is an energy-intensive and massively industrial infrastructure’

(Carruth 2014, 342). But this visual and verbal ideological effect, she argues, is not limited to cloud computing. It affects, no less, users’ impressions of ‘platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram’ (ibid.). These impressions, ‘in turn, conceal from public consciousness underlying network infrastructures: the servers, wires, undersea cables, microwave towers, satellites, data centers, and water and energy resources that constitute networks, along with the programs and applications by which devices access those networks’ (ibid.).

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https://www.facebook.com/EcoViate/photos/a.301646489947720.65019.2525858781871 15/722488231196875/?type=3, last accessed March 2018.

A valuable insight furnished by Carruth’s ecocritical analysis of cloud imagery is how online actions, given their situatedness in extensive network infrastructures, can be ecologically significant in a way other than as advertised by digital tree planting

campaigns. Whereas campaigns sing of individuals’ might in ‘[e]mpowering you [them]

to help end deforestation’ (Ecosia Website, About Us), Carruth underscores what she coins ‘the micropolitics of energy—defined as the planetary ramifications of minute individual practices that are fueled by cultural values of connectivity and speed and that rely, above all, on the infrastructure of server farms’ (Carruth 2014, 343–44, author's emphasis).

By, further, making user contributions contingent only on the fact of using an app, the factor of how and why users may engage with the app is also overlooked. Yet, the use of apps need not be ecologically oriented. User reviews of Ecosia admit, for example,

‘now I can look up dumb stuff and plant trees. truly a blessing thank you’ (iTunes, 23/Jan/2015), and ‘Now I can save the environment while looking up porn!’ (Google Play, 11/Sep/2014). As pacification for flippant curiosity and private indulgences, using Ecosia is like using any other search engine that does not ‘plant trees’, as the company proudly distinguishes itself (Ecosia Website, How Ecosia Works). This disposition toward web surfing as a techno-fix is tantamount to trading in one consumer gadget for another, while believing, ‘in ecosia there is no such thing as a waste of time, because even if you cannot find what you are looking for, you are helping! I love it’ (iTunes, 8/Sep/2014).

Although searches themselves do nothing to plant trees, the counter in the upper right of one’s screen (see Figure 26, p.176) would suggest otherwise. Upon noticing the

‘668’ in the screenshot I provided earlier from my browser, one might think I have contributed significantly to the company’s planting efforts, whereas, in fact, I do not remember clicking a single ad. Ecosia, nonplussed by the potential for the counter to thus mislead, assures prospective users: ‘The more monthly active users Ecosia has, the more relevant it becomes to advertisers’ (Ecosia, Knowledge Base, ‘Personal counter’). As these ads are delivered by Bing and Yahoo (Fischetti 2013; Kroll 2016), there is no reason the ads will privilege more eco-conscious brands or services or even, more socially minded companies and organisations. An indiscriminate reliance on advertising means that such tree-planting apps are enabled by an industry that thrives if only because of its ability to perpetuate interest in consumer goods and services.

The problems with marketing apps as quick and easy pathways to savoury ecological results, shine through in this lack of care about what it means to be planting

while one consumes digital products and services as usual. The turn to advertising, to this point, can be appreciated with respect to the broader consumerist orientation toward the use of apps to plant trees. A humorous but telling indication of this fact is one blogger’s irritated remarks on the iPhone app iPhorest (4.99 USD), which planted a tree along the Gulf Coast through Conservational International for each download and subsequently for each virtual tree grown through the app (Colburn 2009). To plant a virtual tree, users had

while one consumes digital products and services as usual. The turn to advertising, to this point, can be appreciated with respect to the broader consumerist orientation toward the use of apps to plant trees. A humorous but telling indication of this fact is one blogger’s irritated remarks on the iPhone app iPhorest (4.99 USD), which planted a tree along the Gulf Coast through Conservational International for each download and subsequently for each virtual tree grown through the app (Colburn 2009). To plant a virtual tree, users had