Sustainable Consumerism via Self-Regulation

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 boycot or buycot (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 loose 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.