Hot or not: A qualitative study on ecological impact of social media & fashion consumption

Over the past few years, social media and social networking systems have become increasingly popular and have become immersed into people's lives in many ways. In this paper, we investigate how social media influence people in making decisions about fashion consumption of digital artifacts, especially from the perspective of sustainability. As a way to investigate, we conducted a qualitative study with 17 people by asking them about their experience of using social media in choosing electronic computing and communication devices. Our findings include an interpretation of people's motivations on fashion consumption, people's awareness of the ecological impacts of fashion consumption, as well as how social media influence people in making decisions about fashion consumption. © 2012 ACM.