Digital Watch

It hit in the greengrocer’s this week. The first wave of festive nostalgia, Wham’s Last Christmas, unmistakeable even on a little shop radio. Though, increasingly I’m finding the jingle-bell memories of past Christmases are tempered with a bit of ethical reflection. The climate emergency, the cost of living crisis, imminent recession…there are so many reasons not to consume, or at least not to consume in the same way. And not just at Christmas. I’ve been reflecting on how something that sounds almost trivial as a topic – how we shop – is in fact a massive part of how we live our lives and by extension the impact we have. The internet has opened up wormholes and options and ways of shopping that are brain-fryingly complex and seem equally as capable of turning us into considered consumers or click-happy stuff guzzlers.

Take the trivial example of my own grocery shop. In my lifetime this has evolved from supermarket ‘big shops’ instore, to ‘big shops’ online to the sort of insanely piecemeal arrangement I currently run. We combine local shopping (high street, farmers’ market, refillable shop) with some specialist online suppliers of bulk goods (toilet paper, detergent), infrequent online supermarket shops (stuff in tins) and many, many trips to the local Londis (milk, emergency biscuits). Is the way we shop impacting what we buy, and the environmental impact of our consumption?

You may be familiar with the 2020 letter from Jeff Bezos to Amazon shareholders in which he makes the bold claim that shopping online is ‘inherently more carbon efficient than going to the store’. The explanation for this appears to be the way that online deliveries remove individual consumer’s cars from the road. But it seems to hold constant how much and what we are actually buying so as a statement it seems almost….trivial?

Rather than making consumption efficient, isn’t the bigger challenge how we evolve into conscious consumers?

Sticking with groceries for now, a quick brainstorm reveals lots of theoretical ways digital platforms could drive more ethical consumption. How about:

• Building on direct-to-consumer models to link me up with local food producers? (Rather than just the sort of goods that lend themselves to catchy tiktoks).
• Framing choices so we pick more sustainable options. For example, groceries could be organised by food miles incurred, or I could be reminded that ‘people like me typically eat less meat/ fewer Ritz crackers’.
• Encouraging use of apps which help me better understand the impact of my purchases; CoGo might be one such example, I’ll try it out and report back.

These kinds of approaches could help us consume better, couldn’t they? Maybe, though this study in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour reminds us how nascent research in this area is. More fundamentally, I think it also underlines the problem of viewing the challenge of sustainability through a consumerist lens. Let’s put a few issues to one side: (i) the potential irritation of your online shop appearing to somehow moralise, (ii) the difficulty of squaring this with retailers’ drive for revenue and profit, and (iii) the possibility your shopping gets more expensive (note that participants in the experiment were told they were shopping with a voucher in order to neutralise the price effect). We are still left with a glaring problem. We have to care.

I was mulling this over with a colleague and friend whose research interests lie in environmental psychology, and specifically how our identities might inform our behaviour. We talked about the concept of ‘environmental identities‘ and how our relationship with the planet might impact the choices we make. Instinctively, I love this idea, and especially how it pushes us to think more deeply. In particular, it reminds us that what is at stake is real, not digital.

Perhaps this is the paradox of any online tool driving sustainable behaviour. Maybe the most important work it could do is push us away from itself entirely, forcing us instead to reconnect with the world and scrutinise how we’re treating it.