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If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/ authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -This study seeks to examine the fashion consciousness of young consumers in the Southern Province of Sri Lanka, and to explain the impact of gender and education on fashion consciousness of young fashion consumers.Design/methodology/approach -A survey design was used to collect the data and 215 youngsters below 25 years of age were selected for the study. A structured questionnaire was used to examine the fashion consciousness of respondents. Three factors of fashion consciousness were suggested by exploratory factor analysis procedure, and they were established for further analysis based on the results of confirmatory factor analysis. The study tested three hypotheses to examine the degree of fashion consciousness and the impact of gender and education on fashion consciousness. Findings -The survey results showed that respondents have a fair level of fashion consciousness and their fashion consciousness was affected by the gender and education. It was highlighted that the fashion consciousness is context-dependent and the fashion consciousness of young consumers in Sri Lanka is mainly related to their consciousness about Western fashions.Originality/value -The study stresses the inseparability of fashion consumers' mental status and his/her socioeconomic and cultural surrounding, especially in the post-colonial context.

Framing online collective behavior within theoretical frameworks developed to describe offline phenomena is common in social media studies. This can limit the scope of analysis because the interplay between user capabilities, intentions, and platform architecture makes online exchanges different from offline interaction. We introduce a novel conception of online publicness, momentary connectedness, which is a structure of polymorphic computer-mediated sociality that includes transactive as well as non-transactive phenomenological online activity. We suggest that Twitter issue-response hashtags can be seen as affordances for momentary connectedness where Tweets that display broad and vague audience dimensions, as well as clusters with different interactional orientations, co-exist within the same topical network. We illustrate this polymorphism of momentary connectedness with a case study of an issue-response network.

is a lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde. His current research focuses on social media affordances, issue-response networks, and cross-ideology exposure, with a special emphasis on the ways in which new media affordances restructure collective activity.

Background: As a psychoactive substance that spans borders and cultures, researchers estimate that 600 million people use the areca nut. Despite its historical and geographical significance, betel nut use has received far less research attention than other stimulants such as tobacco, coffee or tea. Scholars have observed that social media platforms have significant effects on the promotion and use of addictive substances.Objectives: Our study investigates user practices and activities on a sample of Instagram posts tagged #betelnut dating back to 2011.Methods: Using social media analytics and hashtag network analysis, we examined user practices and activities on a sample of over 7800 Instagram posts tagged #betelnut dated between July 2011 to February 2019 that were collected in early 2019.Results: Findings determined that #betelnut is a growing topical hashtag on Instagram with content that drives social engagement.Importance: Co-occurring hashtags with #betelnut reflect regional language and cultural naming conventions that center around the Indian subcontinent and Melanesia. The importance of future work in this area is highlighted.