Where the Internet Lives is a podcast and mini-documentary series about the unseen world of data centers. Our objective is to demystify data centers and dig into issues around data centers, such as what benefits do they bring to the world by providing the internet, Al, and Cloud-based services to scientists, cities and individuals, and what challenges do they face that require innovation, such as energy and water consumption.
For Season 4, our theme is resilience.
As communities all over the world grapple with extreme weather, natural resource protection, food security, and protecting public health, the role of data centers is more important than ever.
A number of data pioneers at Google are bringing data into the hands of policymakers, grassroots organizations, and individuals who are using it in easy, natural ways to tell stories, inform policies and programming, and increase transparency to solve problems like hunger, food waste, deforestation, climate financing, grid reliability, health and safety. Google’s data center infrastructure makes these tools powerful and accessible to all.
Our stories bring in a wide range of voices: founders and innovators who are creating these tools: farmers, food banks, and community organizers who are tapping into them to solve problems; and individuals who benefit.
We take a journalistic approach. Each episode features selections from interviews from multiple guests, inside and outside Google, woven into a cohesive narrative facilitated by our host, Stephanie Wong.
Our accompanying films put a human face on data, each one focusing on a single person making a difference in the world through their use of data. Our stories show we can use data and AI responsibly to help solve some of the world's greatest challenges. Our hope is to that these stories give hope.
We conducted dozens and dozens of pre-interviews to find the right voices at Google and outside Google who are both working on making the world (the grid, our climate, our food system, our health, our environment) more resilient. Once we found and recorded the most compelling pieces, the challenge was to weave them all together, along with news clips, to bring our listeners into the issues. We challenged ourselves to tackle the thorny issues, such as how much energy AI requires, head on.
For our films, we faced challenges such as a hail storm knocking out all the crops of the farmer we hoped to feature. The food and ag industry is one of the last sectors to embrace data and we went down many paths before we landed on the best story. Turns out is was worth it. The food episode and video are the most popular pieces we produced this season.
The humanity of the voices and the stories came through and these topics resonate. This is our most popular season yet and our pod episodes, trailer, and videos all together have reached more than 500, 000 downloads.
