"Consider the impact of personal networking devices, in terms of the environment. What do you think are the biggest areas of immediate impact? How about long term impact?"
This is an area I am not hugely familiar with. I think, however, it is easy to see a few potential positives as well as some negatives associated with the environmental impact.
Let's start with the positives -
1. Less wired infrastructure could lead to less large-scale development, construction, and destruction of natural areas.
2. All-in-one digital devices allow access to many things we used to buy individually. Things like newspapers, magazines, books, cameras, video cameras, movies, cds, audio recorders, pdas, etc. are all being combined into singular wireless devices that allow access to most forms of media.
Now, some negatives -
1. Our need as a society to have the newest, fastest, devices often leads to cycling through technology well before it's usefulness has expired. This leads to more production and more waste. Both of which demand natural resources and contribute to pollution.
2. Unknown long-term health impact of large-scale wireless networks and personal devices. Who knows what these wireless signals could end up doing to us and natural over the next 100 years. Maybe nothing, but maybe we will see a huge epidemic of cancer and birth defects.
3. The need to replace old wired infrastructure with wireless infrastructure in buildings will create a large amount of waste when we need to dispose of mountains of old cables and outdated hardware.
4. Increased usage of these services creates more demand for more bandwidth, server space, and more meaning there will be more electricity used, more centers built, and a more impact on the environment. This could potentially be negated by the lowered demand for physical media such as dvds, cds, books, etc., however.
For some additional reading, here are a few interesting articles on the topic of wireless devices and their impact on the environment that I found after writing this up:
http://www.bsr.org/reports/BSR_CTIA_Wireless_and_the_Environment.pdf
http://www.gsma.com/publicpolicy/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/environmobiledevices.pdf
