Fashion 'too scared to innovate with tech', says ex Top-shop marketing chief

Justin Cooke says that despite fashion week campaigns, many brands are still taking too long to exploit social media, personalisation and the power of data.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/16/london-fashion-week-technology-justin-cooke

"One of the first things I pioneered at Top shop was creating the first ever live customisation of the catwalk. This technology allowed viewers to change the colour of a look coming down the runway which kept them on the site for longer," says Cooke. "But perhaps more importantly you get real time insights from your customers of what shapes and colours they love the most which is very powerful." this is something said by the top shop models about the catwalk they had. Shes saying that the technology allows the audience to change the colour of the image which attracts them

I believe With technology fast becoming one of the fundamental pillars of the bi-annual fashion event, the competition is on for designers and brands to bring a touch of digital to their shows. This season will see Top shop partner with the Chirp app, which allows users to share content via sound waves  Clements Beriberi  meanwhile, announced an entirely digital presentation to coincide with the launch of their new website.

Ambitious plans by the British Fashion Council include live streaming multiple catwalk shows, for the first time, directly to the official Twitter account and giving London commuters their fashion fix via a weekly #Fashion Friday news bulletin on underground platform screens - all designed to open up an exclusive industry event to the public.

 
As the new collections of some of the world's best known designers are unveiled in the coming days, coverage of the event will inevitably focus on the buzz created on Twitter and across social media platforms. So has technology finally become cool in the fashion world? "Both industries thrive on being the first to market," explains Cooke. "It's all about developing trends and predicting what people want and I think it marries very well together."

Teenager Streotypes

Teenagers are frequently alienated in the media to the point that it has become a real problem in our society. This is affecting the togetherness of our communities and creating unfair stereotypes. Do all teens fit the stereotypes that the media creates?

You could argue that teenagers only have themselves to blame for these negative stereotypes, for example the London Riots in 2011 where it was well renowned that young people were the main offenders. This generalisation by the media has had serious effects on communities such as the one in Farnham Common. In Farnham Common I believe that there is a fairly tight knit community, however, since the London Riots I believe that there has been a change in attitude towards teenagers. We all saw the Riots on our television screens and it seems to have had a big effect on the passive viewers among the community. I spoke to a 17 year old that lives in Farnham Common and he told me “the attitude towards teenagers has turned very negative since the riots. I feel that the older generation in the village have become intimidated and feel vulnerable when I walk past them. This is very upsetting for me and my friends as we mean no harm.” This saddening verdict conveys how our community is tearing itself apart with intimidation, just because the media has displayed teenagers in a negative way. This really shows how the media has control over our society and can manipulate us to believe things that may be over-exaggerated or perhaps false.

Teenagers are also stereotyped as being lazy, when in fact most teenagers juggle part-time jobs and their education. These unfair stereotypes effect job opportunities for unemployed teenagers, so it is no wonder that in the period July-September 2012, 963,000 young people aged 16-24 were unemployed. This astonishing amount of unemployment in teenagers is actually down by 49,000 as the economy recovers from the recession. However, it is still a very powerful statistic. I would bet that most of these young people, especially aged 16, do not have a job because of the ridiculously low minimum wage that the government has put in place. It currently stands at £3.68 for 16 year olds and an unemployed 16 year old told me, “I think that the minimum wage is very low”, however, she then added, “as teenagers, we do not have to pay for many things such as bills, so I can understand why the minimum wage gets higher as you get older”. I do not agree with this as some teenagers do live alone and require a higher wage to survive. Higher paid jobs are hard to come by because of a lack of qualifications available at the age of 16 and of course, the negative media representation they are given. As I walk around the shops in the Farnham Common Village, I do not see a lot of teenagers working there; I see an overwhelming amount of older people. I understand that they will be more experienced than younger people, but if no-one gives you a chance, how do you gain experience?

Moral panic

‘Moral panic’ is a sociological concept that seeks to explain a particular type of overreaction to a perceived social problem. Developed in the turbulent political and 
intellectual context of the late 1960s, its principal aim was to expose the processes 
involved in creating concern about a social problem; concern that bore little relationship 
to the reality of the problem, but nevertheless provided the basis for a shift in social or 
legal codes. The concept has since enjoyed a great deal of analytical purchase, 
circumscribing it to be one of the few sociological ideas that have withstood the test of 
time (see Innes, 2005). However, much of its application has relied upon ritually 
reproducing the ‘stages’ implied in the now canonized opening paragraph of Stanley 
Cohen’s (1972) seminal study, Folk Devils and Moral Panics(Critcher, 2006: 10; see 
also Young, 2009).

This simple headline shows the escalation of fear or misunderstanding of illegal immigrants. The word ‘stop’ is a call to action and implies that something needs to be done. ‘Boat people’ is the label which implies the threat of illegal immigration and it ran in a national newspaper, purportedly endorsed by the PM and used to bring to the attention of the voting public an issue which is considered to be of grave concern. In reality, a study conducted by UQ research group says there were only 1033 boat people out of 48,700 illegal immigrants in Australia.

Articles

Critical investigation research

What is social media?

There are many definitions of the term “social media” floating around the Internet. While social media is used heavily for marketing, the definition offered by Ron Jones of Search Engine Watch captures what kids are using social networking sites for.

social media as “essentially a category of online media where people are talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online. Most social media services encourage discussion, feedback, voting, comments, and sharing of information from all interested parties.”

social media is a two-way conversation that allows people to stay “connected or linked to other sites, resources, and people.” The key words for teenagers being “stay connected.”

Benefits

Teens use social media to stay connected with their friends, meet new friends, share photos, play games, blog, do homework, and promote causes they believe in.

A study in Pediatrics (2011) revealed that teens use social media in a positive way to

• connect with people with shared interests
• learn about people with varied backgrounds
• enhance their creativity by sharing musical and artistic projects
• expand their ideas by creating blogs, videos, and podcasts
• collaborate on school projects outside of class
• raise money for charity
• volunteer for local charitable and political events

Access to health information

Teens are also using social media to access information on health topics from sexually transmitted diseases to depression. Teens with chronic health conditions are able to access networks that offer support.

Parents should initiate conversations with teens about health matters in order to help teens navigate the massive amount of information on the Internet. Teens need help to ensure the information they’ve found comes from an accurate, reliable source.

Negative effects

Despite the many benefits of social media use, parents may be more familiar with the negative effects, especially if one’s information source is media news reports. Some of the negative effects associated with teens’ social media use include

• cyberbullying and online harassment
• sexting
• “Facebook depression”
• lower school grades

New Top 10 Social Networking Websites 2013

1. Facebook.com

Facebook.com is not only most popular social networking website but also world most visited website. In other words Facebook is number one website in the planet right now. (Google.com number two in the world and number one in the US)

2. Google+

Google+ is the second most popular social networking website on Google platform. This is very popular among blogger especially. According to Wikipedia page, Google+ surpassed twitter in January 2013 and become second largest social networking website.

Google+ has more than 500 (plus) million registered users.

3. Twitter.com

Twitter.com is one of the most popular micro blogging theme best social networking website. World famous social networking word 'Tweet' is associated with twitter.com. Now over 350 million tweets are generating daily.

Website: www.twitter.com.

4. Qzone.com

qzone is very popular social networking website of China. This best chinese social networking website has already 500 (plus) million registered users. That makes it one of the largest social networking websites.

website: qzone.qq.com

5. Linkedin.com

Linkedin.com is most popular social networking websites among professional people.This is world's largest professional networks.

Website: www.linkedin.com

6. Vk.com

vk.com is largest European social network website. Also second most visited website of Russia.

Website: www.vk.com

7. Pinterest.com

Pinterest.com is one of the most visited website categorized in social networking. Social Networking theme of this site is, Pinboard style photo sharing website.

Website: www.pinterest.com

8. Bebo

Bought by AOL for $850m, Bebo was sold to Criterion Capital Partners last year for less than $10m and relaunched in February with a new design. Bebo is a popular social networking website of Russia and Europe. Social networking theme of this website is 'Classmates and old friends'. That means this is popular social networking website among classmates and old friends.

Website: www.bebo.com

9. Instagram.com

Instagram.com is an online photo sharing, video sharing social networking website. Actually it provides facility to share your photos and videos on a others leading social networking website like Facebook, Twitter and more. After US, Instagram is most popular photo sharing social networking website in Brazil, UK, Russia and Canada.

Website: www.instagram.com

10. Deviantart.com

Deviantart.com is popular social networking website among artists. Deviantart.com is popular social networking site among photographers, digital artists, traditional artists, filmmakers, Flash animators and similar artists. This is very popular among US artists. This is also popular social networking site in India, UK, Germany and Indonesia.

Website: www.deviantart.com

Top 2 most popular social networking sites used by teenagers in 2013

1, Facebook

Is an online social networking service, whose name stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. It was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and eventually to anyone aged 13 and over. Facebook now allows any users who declare they to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the site.

2. Twitter

Is an online social networking service and micro blogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets". Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and by July, the social networking site was launched. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 500 million registered users as of 2012, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. Since its launch, Twitter has become one of the ten most visited websites on the Internet, and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet." Unregistered users can read tweets, while registered users can post tweets through the website interface, SMS, or a range of apps for mobile devices.

POSITIVE REPRESENTATION:

I will be giving information of positive representation of teenagers to show that not all teenagers are the same and shouldn't be portrayed as negative due because of the other bad teenagers taking over. The media have used teenagers as a topic to talk about and have injected stereotypes in the general public’s mind which makes them fear when going out and facing teens. This has also given a bad name to those who are not like that and have also been portrayed as 'hood rats.' these evidence and pictures show positive representations of most teenagers on social networking sites which only use them for themselves and do not cause any fear to any of the public.

    http://mychannel957.com/teen-featured-in-inspirational-viral-video-dies/

Zach Soviet, the 18-year-old star of an internet video that went viral, passed away early Monday morning surrounded by friends and family. In the past few weeks, donations to Zach’s cause, the Children’s Cancer Research Fund, increased immensely, as did downloads of his song, “Clouds,” which has more than 2.9 million page views on YouTube.

http://www.pamf.org/teen/life/bodyimage/media.html

Stereotypes; Unfortunately, most of the media you are exposed to do not show people in a realistic way. Characters on TV are often shown with unrealistic "perfect" bodies. Women are shown as too thin and men are shown with larger-than-life muscles. Photographs in magazines or billboards are edited on the computer to erase flaws and imperfections. Even if you know that what you see is not normal or not real, it can still impact you.  Many teens want to be like the characters they see on TV. Also, some forms of media do not show the real diversity of the world. According to Common Sense Media, 74 present of the characters on TV are Caucasian, and 64 present of video game characters are males. 

Violence; the media teaches kids that violence is acceptable. In video games, the way to beat an opponent is to punch, kick or knock him out. In some video games, you might even kill your opponent. In movies, the good guy wins when he violently defeats his enemy.  A study showed that 4-year olds have a greater chance of being bullies when they are older if they watch a lot of violent TV. Seeing violent behaviour on TV or through other forms of media can also make teens act more violently. 

NEGATIVE REPRESENTATION 

I will be posting pictures up on here of negative representation of teenagers. I will be giving evidence of my explanation on what things teenagers have been doing on social networking sites that cause the general public to give them a bad representation as you can see I have given several examples of this to show what teenagers have been doing and what the consequences is at the end as some people have been killed or some have been put into prison on the way they have been behaving.

Unfortunately, most of the media you are exposed to do not show people in a realistic way. Characters on TV are often shown with unrealistic "perfect" bodies. Women are shown as too thin and men are shown with larger-than-life muscles. Photographs in magazines or billboards are edited on the computer to erase flaws and imperfections. Even if you know that what you see is not normal or not real, it can still impact you. 

http://www.thenewsstar.com/article/20130613/NEWS01/306130030/Viral-video-results-in-arrest-of-Sterlington-teen?gcheck=1&nclick_check=1

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3755913/Jordan-Blackshaw-and-Perry-Sutcliffe-Keenan-jailed-4-years-for-Facebook-riot-posts.html

The media teaches kids that violence is acceptable. In video games, the way to beat an opponent is to punch, kick or knock him out. In some video games, you might even kill your opponent. In movies, the good guy wins when he violently defeats his enemy.  A study showed that 4-year olds have a greater chance of being bullies when they are older if they watch a lot of violent TV. Seeing violent behaviour on TV or through other forms of media can also make teens act more violently. 

Tutorial

In my tutorial I have decided to do the text of how does representation of teenagers in e-media (social networking sites) such as Facebook and twitter reinforce the negative stereotypes and create moral panic to the public?

Targets to do; 

• Research about teenagers and what they are doing
• Research on what types of different social networking sites there are and which two are mainly used by teenagers
• What do the things teenagers put up say to us and what does it mean, does it show a positive representation or negative?
• Research viral videos and analyse
• Talk about negative teenage representation and positive
• Show the link between them two

Research project

TOP 5

1. One possible media text I have chosen to do my presentation on is how teenagers are represented on  social networking sites such as Facebook and twitter.
2. The next possible media text I have chosen is how social networking sites are distracting teenagers in a negative way but also showing binary opposition of how are they are helping teenagers with their work
3. The third media text I have chosen is how reality TV has disrupted the teenager mind 
4. The third media text I have chosen is how teenagers are being represented on the media
5. To what extent does news media create moral panic and represent teenagers in a negative way that the public should fear?

TOP 3 (SHORT-LISTED)

1. The next possible media text I have chosen is how e-media is distracting teenagers lives in a negative way but also showing binary opposition of how are they are helping teenagers with their work

• Teenagers have been spending to much time on social networking sites that they have lost concentration over their work
• Socialising with friends over social networking sites have been distracting teenagers as they are spending their whole day on Facebook/twitter and not with their family's
• E-media has also made teenagers believe things that are not true 
• On the other hand e-media has helped teenagers with their work as well as they are able to use e-media to research media institutions and also gain help from their friends The third media text I have chosen is how reality TV shows such as 'big brother' have disrupted the teenager mind 
• http://www.pamf.org/teen/life/bodyimage/media.html media represent teenagers as hood rats as they see groups of teenagers on the roads drinking and smoking which causes bad influence on Youngers. However we said this puts a bad impact on the good teenagers as well as they also get that negative representation. 

1. The third media text I have chosen is how reality TV has disrupted the teenager mind 

• The reason i have chosen this is that many teenage minds have been distrupted by the teenager
• Teenagers watching reality shows make them believe that is what is really going in life
• Teenagers think that this is how people really behave 
• They get distracted watching to much reality TV that they don't know what is going on in the real world
• they are losing concentration
• http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/reality-tv-show-violence-real-life-consequences-teen/story?id=13256971 - As you can see here this is example of a teenager who has watched reality TV has gone violent attacking someone due to them watching this on TV

1. To what extent does news media create moral panic and represent teenagers in a negative way that the public should fear?

• the reason i have chosen this media text is because i want to know how the media create the moral panic and represent teenagers now in a negative way as there are some facts to this and also some are false as even good teenagers are beeing seen in a negative way in the eyes of the public, and i want to research and know why the media are choosing teenagers to talk about over the TV/news 
• Teenagers have been represented in negative way on the media
• Teenagers have been represented as 'hood rats' on the streets as they are seen in groups smoking and drinking in an early age
• teenagers have been caught shop lifting etc. which has made the media think that all teenagers are like this
• Even the innocent ones have been represented in a negative way
• However on the other side their also positive sides to teenagers 
• For example Disney is a positive representation of teenagers
• http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/lcs9603.html
• http://www.historyextra.com/feature/youth-culture-and-crime-what-can-we-learn-history - Problem of what is going on in the teenage world
•