Definitions
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) manage and communicate data in an increasingly interconnected world. They include a series of technologies and services such as computers, mobile devices, communication networks, the Internet, cloud computing, data analytics, and various other tools that continuously shape business practices and consumers’ behaviors.
Digital technologies offer a significant potential for enhancing efficient production, reducing resource use, facilitating the exchange of goods and services, and promoting knowledge creation and social interactions. These technologies can contribute to decoupling economic growth from resource consumption and foster sustainable lifestyles. However, ICT can also lead to the overuse of resources through overproduction and compulsive consumption, technostress, social isolation, being detached from physical reality and nature, and mental overload. Ethical concerns such as privacy violations, fraud, empathy loss, and inequality also arise. While these issues do not necessarily result from ICT itself, they are linked to the purposes for which it is developed, and adopted – creating a dilemma for sustainable living.
ICT also creates manifold socio-environmental pressures, such as the extraction of raw materials, increasing energy and infrastructural demands, CO2e emissions, complex supply chains, planned obsolescence, and e-waste generation, among other issues. Despite the widespread adoption of technologies like mobile phones, a growing digital divide persists between those who can afford access and those who cannot. Digital lifestyles are also unequal, with increasingly blurred lines between the real and the online worlds, leading to diverse malaises, physical, mental, and social, calling for digital literacy education, stringent data protection laws, and also learning how to be “offline”. Furthermore, the pervasive use of digital technologies poses potential threats to traditional cultures and human development. Addressing these challenges requires a balanced approach that harnesses the benefits of digital technologies while mitigating their negative impacts on society and the environment.
History
Arguably, media consumption and its influence on our lifestyles date back to the first printing press in the 15th century. Its development accelerated rapidly toward the end of the 20th century when the computing industry took off and led to greatly accelerating consumption. From using radio and television for product placement and the presentation of aspirational lifestyles to the proliferation of e-commerce and the increasing sophistication of data collection processes to personalize advertising, technology keeps shaping everyday decisions, behaviors, attitudes, social norms, and social dynamics alike.
The speed and volume of data processed and mined through personal devices have led to an explosion of online services, such as e-commerce and social media, which, besides displacing conventional consumer-seller-producer interactions, have created entirely new commercialization and information channels. These have been used to drive consumption, empower (and manipulate) consumers, and raise awareness about underlying sustainability issues. The provided information induced anxiety about the global impact of increased consumption, but at the same time encouraged global movements to curb production and shift lifestyles. Since the 2010s, the Internet of Things (IoT) has significantly contributed to more efficient use of resources at the household level; a decade later, emerging virtual technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the metaverse have opened new opportunities for humans to engage in sustainable consumption practices in a fully digitized world, extending beyond physical reality.
Different Perspectives
ICT is a double-edged sword. Solutions touted as environmentally friendly have other, less desirable, features and socio-economic implications. For example, artificial intelligence (see Box 84.1), which could enable more efficient use of resources, also perfects consumer targeting with personalized advertisements that could lead to more mindless consumption and rebound effects. Robotics, which allows faster, more efficient production and services, can potentially replace human labor, increase unemployment, and widen poverty gaps.
Box 84.1 Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI)– applications and technologies programmed to think and learn like humans, simulating human intelligence in machines. Its application in robotics, particularly in the service industry, has significantly improved the efficiency in decision-making, mainly in terms of customer satisfaction and improving decision quality via automation, personalization, and humanization. These non-human agents, whether embodied as physical robots, chatbots, or virtual assistants, have seamlessly integrated into the fabric of daily consumption life.
The Internet of Things (see Box 84.2) aims to reduce energy and material consumption. Virtual technologies (see Box 84.3) reshape multiple realities (e.g., virtual reality, augmented reality, extended reality, mixed reality) and promise to dematerialize consumption and enable sensorial experiences. However, these technologies may increase the dependency on gadgets, sensors, and demand for new products – again requiring new resources. Consumption experiences in virtual realities are expected to reduce the need for physical goods and substitute them with experiences. Yet, access to these worlds demands other types of consumption choices, skills, physical abilities, and, of course, the literacy and infrastructure to make everything possible.
Box 84.2 Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) describes any sensor-enabled device that collects and transmits data through internet connections. It is also a framework that bridges the physical and virtual worlds through new applications and services on the Internet, creating an inclusive, “smart” information system that helps regulate consumption (e.g., energy) and improve efficiency. Its applications include healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, smart cities, industries, and commerce.
Box 84.3 Virtual technologies and the metaverse
Virtual technologies comprise the devices and platforms that simulate environments and stimulate the senses to interact with digitally generated content. The two core virtual technologies are Virtual Reality (VR) – which recreates new realities to immerse human senses via different stimuli – and Augmented Reality (AR) – which overlays information (e.g., images, videos) onto the physical environment. Other technologies include Augmented Virtuality (AV), which superimposes content on top of physical realities, Mixed Realities (MR), which allows real-time coexistence and interactions between physical and digital objects, and Extended Reality (XR), which encompasses all the virtual and real human-machine interactions. Besides their hedonic and fun applications, these technologies are being increasingly applied by the utility and business sectors.
The metaverse consists of these artificially generated, modified, diverse, and extended realities built on the convergence of virtual technologies with visual, linguistic, spatial, aural, and gestural compositions (multimodality) and human representations (avatars).
ICT is also changing the notions of ownership, safety, and even economic systems, for example, blockchain technology (BT), known mainly for cryptocurrency trading, is also used for patient data management, supply chain transactions, voting systems, and legal agreements. While more literacy for understanding its use and applications is needed, its socio-environmental impacts in the mid-and long-term remain an open research area.
Applications
The case of ICT-enabled efficiencies to address environmental concerns is clear: more efficient production processes convey less use of resources and waste reduction. However, the intricacies of ICT include other aspects with considerable environmental impacts, such as planned obsolescence and low device recyclability rates, the exploding demand for energy to enable these technologies, and adequate infrastructure, to name a few. On the social front, automation translates into job losses and greater demand for high-skilled workers. Other concerns include data ownership, manipulation, safety, digital literacy, cyber-bullying, management of intellectual property, and recognition of artistic creations. Nowadays, solutions like the Metaverse (see Box 84.4) are seen as enablers of sustainable lifestyles because of their potential, for example, to assess life cycles and derive solutions for reducing material consumption and to simulate environments where the consequences of decisions can be experienced (e.g., living in a world 3°C hotter) thus encouraging lifestyle shifts in the “real” world.
Besides having the potential to enable more convenient consumption practices, ICT often enhances consumption’s emotional and behavioral aspects through Gamification and Digital Sensory Marketing (see Box 84.4), approaches that have shown their potential to support individual efforts across several lifestyle domains. While gamification is predominantly used in environmental efforts, such as reducing energy consumption at the household level or promoting ecofriendly driving, its application is expanding into social domains. Here, it aims to influence diverse consumption-related behaviors – from providing information and encouraging more informed, conscious decisions to fostering overconsumption through playful environments designed to keep users coming back for more. Similarly, Digital Sensory Marketing enables the possibility to experience the impacts of lifestyle choices, thus enabling better-informed decision-making processes. Both approaches are highly persuasive, and when applied to incentivize consumption, it can lead to more wasteful lifestyles as the purchase of cheap, low-quality products is only a tap away.
Box 84.4 Exemplary applications of technology
- Gamification – “an intentional process of transforming any activity, system, service, product, or organizational structure into one which affords positive experiences, skills, and practices similar to those afforded by games … the gameful experience” (Hamari, 2019: 1)
- Digital Sensory Marketing (DSM) – integrates new technologies into a multisensory experience, engaging the consumers’ five senses (namely visual, olfactory, auditory, gustatory, and tactile), gathering information from our daily surroundings, and generating physical sensations that impact consumers’ emotional, cognitive and social perception and experiences as well as behavior and decision-making.
Overall, digital technologies have the potential to reduce people’s general need to move from one place to another while enabling “feeling” and experiencing products and places as if they were real, albeit in a digital realm. Despite the promising narratives of ICT to enhance more sustainable consumption, their actual development and application constitute an oxymoron where innovation and profitability clash with societal well-being and environmental impacts. To address this situation, all stakeholders should engage in responsible practices, such as considering technology’s unintended impacts, the transparent use of data, and developing technology-free habits to enjoy in our daily lives.
Further Reading
Hargittai, E. (2018). The digital reproduction of inequality. In D.B. Grusky & S. Szelényi (Eds.), The inequality reader, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429494468.
Hamari, J. (2019). Gamification. In G. Ritzek & C. Rojek (Eds.), The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Sociology. John Wiley and Sons.
Pellegrino, A., Stasi, A., & Wang, R. (2023). Exploring the intersection of sustainable consumption and the Metaverse: A review of current literature and future research directions. Heliyon. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e19190.
Petit, O., Velasco, C., & Spence, C. (2019). Digital sensory marketing: Integrating new technologies into multisensory online experience. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 45(1), 42–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intmar.2018.07.004.
Stephanidis, C., Salvendy, G., Antona, M., Chen, J. Y. C., Dong, J., Duffy, V. G., Fang, X., Fidopiastis, C., Fragomeni, G., Fu, L. P., Guo, Y., Harris, D., Ioannou, A., Jeong, K. (Kate), Konomi, S., Krömker, H., Kurosu, M., Lewis, J. R., Marcus, A.,… Zhou, J. (2019). Seven HCI grand challenges. In International journal of human–computer interaction, Vol. 35, Issue 14, pp. 1229–1269. Informa UK Limited. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2019.1619259.
Xi, N., Chen, J., Gama, F., Korkeila, H., & Hamari, J. (2024). Virtual experiences, real memories? A study on information recall and recognition in the metaverse. In Information systems frontiers. Springer Science and Business Media LLC. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-024-10500-2.