Problematisation
For my digital artefact I will be investigating fashion influencers. Since conducting some initial research and trying to problematise my media niche, lifestyle influencer Choe Szep, I have come across a problem relating to ethical and sustainable fashion. By taking my experience and observations and turning them around to see my niche from a different perspective, I was able to understand and notice that aspects of my media niche such as sustainable fashion and ethical production from brands are not communicated enough by well-known fashion influencers.
Ethical fashion is becoming more and more of a popular topic in today’s society which is why it is important for influencers and bloggers to maintain an environmentally friendly way of promoting Australian made products, made with sustainable materials. I will be researching this issue as my new media niche to better understand how fashion influencers actually take ethics and sustainability of their clothing into consideration when purchasing, and as a result communicate this to their followers on social media. My audience will be people who care about where their clothing purchases have been made, as well as influencers who I feel should take more care into knowing where they are purchasing their clothes from. This research I will be conducting will be beneficial to myself as well as my audience in order to minimise our impact on the environment.
Research plan
For my research, I plan to immense myself as a fulltime follower of fashion bloggers and influencers. This will allow me to gain a better understanding of which influencers are actively choosing ethical and sustainable fashion. I will use the observation and autoethnography to create new knowledge and better understand the prevalence of ethical fashion influencers and bloggers. I will use observation of the influencers and bloggers who do use sustainable fashion, to analyse the impact that they have on their followers. I will keep a log of my data collection (findings and observations) to be analysed and take screenshots of any interesting information and data that will be of use in my digital artefact.
Research schedule
Each day I will take notes and thoroughly record the details of my observations to creating new knowledge based on my experience of these observations. I will be collecting information about the ethical and non-ethical influencers, the brands in which they promote, the social media channels they use, timeline and context of their content, technology used by followers, as well as the followers emotional state. In additional to this, I will keep track of the ethical brands which I find are collaborating with influencers and their experience in doing so.
Week 6: Start the collection of data in the form of notes and screenshots.
Week 7: Explore graphical user interface of the influencers Instagram: how it is organised and the fonts, resolution of the images, settings.
Week 8: Put together information and analyse and interpret the data.
Week 9: Gather finding and start to put together my autoethnographic research report.
Week 10: Edit, proof read and submit report.
References:
The Good Trade, 2020. “What is fast fashion, anyway?”. Accessed 25th August 2020. Available at: https://www.thegoodtrade.com/features/what-is-fast-fashion
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