Your gadget's dirty little secret By Amber MacArthur

Taken from Yahoo news:

Gizmo Diva

Amber Mac

Your gadget's dirty little secret

By Amber Mac

The new iPhone has not one, but two cameras. That digital camera you're sporting this summer has not three, four, or five megapixels, it has 14 megapixels. As for your pocket camcorder? Well, last year it was standard definition but this year it's high definition, complete with more than 200,000 glorious dots of high-res video.

With so many new-and-improved gadgets launching every day in North America, some might say we're neophiliacs, a term I've used now and again to describe a personality type bored with the old and hooked on the new.  

While it's fun to be surrounded with shiny new devices, we often don't think much about where they come from. They're like special little mystery packages, delivered from a tech supplier to an electronics store to our doorstep. But our high-tech addiction comes at a cost. Thanks to a recent op-ed column in The New York Times, there is a sliver of online chatter that is focusing on "death by gadget."

In his article, Nicholas Kristof writes: "An ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity - smartphones, laptops, and digital cameras - are built from materials that seem to be fuelling mass slaughter and rape in the Congo."

The piece goes on to explain the horror of how women and children have been mutilated in the Congo, just to help warlords keep up their selling of "conflict minerals" to big electronics companies.  

One popular YouTube video fighting back against this supply chain is called "I'm a Mac…and I've Got a Dirty Secret." The two actors, a Mac and a PC, talk throughout the video about this conflict and determine at the end that they do have something in common - they're helping to fuel war in the Congo. The Enough Project created this spoof to inform the public about the high cost of our gadget obsession.

 

As Jonathan Huston from The Enough Project says in Kristof's article, "Apple is claiming that their products don't contain conflict minerals because their suppliers say so…people are saying that answer is not enough." Here in Canada, blogger Joey DeVilla has written a compelling post about "blood tech" and what we can do. 

"The Enough Project says that auditing component supply chains at the smelters to see whether the metal was sourced from 'clean' places like Australia or Canada, instead of lining the pockets of Congolese warlords, would add about one cent to the price of a cellphone, and that this figure originates from within the industry. I’d happily pay a thousand times that for each of my devices – a mere ten bucks – to ensure that I wasn’t bankrolling rape and murder."

Nicely said.  I couldn't agree more.  Head on over to http://raisehopeforcongo.com to find out how you can help.