Last month, I noticed an article in Wired, giving us yet another reason to despise spam email (as if we needed more). In addition to stealing our time, energy, and sanity, the article brings to light a study commissioned by McAfee and published by ICF International has quantized the environmental effects of spam. Since spam is largely unwanted, the energy that goes into sending, queuing, delivering, filtering, viewing, and deleting these emails is a complete waste. Yet another reason spammers should be ashamed of themselves.

Of course, the report is really a disguised advertisement for end-user spam filtering tools that McAffee sells, so perhaps it should be taken with a grain of salt. But it got my mind turning, and this focus on the environmental impact of spam really evokes a discussion about a more general question: what are we getting for the energy we spend? In addition to the user-side energy, there's tons of waste at the infrastructure and data-center level, too.

The spam waste is really just the tip of the iceberg of a larger problem: there are very few studies that evaluate the energy spent on networking and computing needs, in the context of useful work done. This is, of course, a difficult problem. The definition of useful work can vary from person to person. In the example above, it's arguable that from a spammer's point of view, the work that these computers is doing is useful, because it gets the advertisement message in front of a large number of eyes. Unfortunately, in a global sense, within some context of social responsibility, the energy used to distribute spam is almost certainly a net loss. Unfortunately the discussion quickly turns into a philosophical debate, which is perhaps why the issue doesn't come up very often.

Consider another example: social networking. The energy devoted to the serving and viewing of social networking websites like Facebook is almost certainly very significant. But how do we assess the global social gain of these sorts of things? They certainly serve well for vanity, and for enabling phatic communication. But is there really a valuable gain that comes from the energy spent on these endeavors? Perhaps this is an argument best left to sociologists.

As our planet moves forward with energy awareness, we must not mask our vision and only look at numbers like kgCO2, kWh, and dollars. We need to consider the value and utility that comes as a result of the expenditure of these things. Since dollars drive the economy, casting the global utility of an action into a dollar amount might be a good starting point. We can also consider some studies that have been done recently to quantize happiness and success, as these take a stab a quantizing abstract sociological qualities in a comparable way.