Sustainable Consumerism via Context-Aware Shopping

Johannes Klinglmayr, Bernhard Bergmair, Maria Klaffenböck, LeanderB. Hörmann, Evangelos Pournaras

OAI: oai:igi-global.com:188859 • DOI: 10.4018/IJDST.2017100104

We are living in a world of vast information. The means of the Internet allow access to diverse sources of information, with social media and Internet of Things technologies significantly expanding the informational ecosystem. With the use of social media, it is easy for ‘like-minded' people to group up and initiate movements. One way to articulate such movements is via political consumerism. Users group together and boycott or buycott (boost purchases) for certain products with a concrete collective goal in mind. If, however, the collective goal is vague and abstract, as in the case of sustainability, this bottom-up strategy may lose its popularity and attraction. In this paper, we introduce a new concept of how individual consumers can follow their own understanding of sustainability, while at the same time benefiting from collective and participatory actions. We discuss how the means of ICT can be used to develop political consumerism further to transform individual policies into collective statements.

Grid & High Performance Computing Computer Science and Information Technology High Performance Computing