Comparative Assessment of Sustainable Consumption Based on the Digital Information Environment Content-Thematic Component Differentiation

The modern culture of consumption often does not correspond to the principles of sustainable development, which leads to environmental pollution. As a possible solution to this problem, the authors propose to analyze the concept of sustainable consumption, following which can reduce the negative imp...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yanjie Li, Daria Terenteva, Olga Konnikova, Evgenii Konnikov
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-06-01
Series:Sustainability
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/13/7215
Description
Summary:The modern culture of consumption often does not correspond to the principles of sustainable development, which leads to environmental pollution. As a possible solution to this problem, the authors propose to analyze the concept of sustainable consumption, following which can reduce the negative impact of mankind on the environment, which is an urgent issue at the global level. The aim of the study is to build a tool for comparative analysis of the level of sustainable consumption. The analysis is carried out in the digital environment, since this space provides a relative freedom of expression of the opinion of individuals, and the obtained data reflect the real level of “sustainability” of the behavior of participants in thematic social communities. The result of the research is an analytical tool tested on thematic social communities of the VK.com social network. In the process of building an analytical tool, primary and secondary tokenization were carried out using computer linguistics tools, an analytical dataframe was formed for a source reflecting the studied content-thematic component. To automate the process of forming a set of tokens, Python 3 programming language was used. The proposed tool can be used to determine the level of sustainable consumption in different social communities relative to each other. This approach can be used by companies to find target audiences and to promote environmentally friendly products. Moreover, this tool can be applied to attract consumers by increasing the level of sustainability in the corporate culture based on the research results. A separate problematic of realizing the developed methodology is the ethical component of analyzing natural digital information and the use of the results obtained on the basis of its analysis.
ISSN:2071-1050