Visioning the Future of Smart Fashion Factories Based on Media Big Data Analysis

Abstract

Recently, many companies have adopted smart factories to increase productivity and efficiency. However, the fashion industry is one of the industries that have been relatively slow at embracing automation and switching to a smart factory. The purpose of the study is to suggest the future direction of the low-maturity smart factory in the fashion industry through newspaper analysis. In this study, semantic network analysis and convergence of iterated correlation (CONCOR) analysis were performed on 15,523 news articles. The analyses revealed that the smart fashion factory was developing to incorporate automated, unmanned, and intelligent operation. The problem of job loss owing to the smart factory was also heavily addressed in the news articles. In the newspaper articles, the view that the smart factory is efficient, fast, and innovative, and concerns regarding the possible damages that will result from hacking and machine malfunction were simultaneously expressed. Therefore, if news about security improvement emerges in the future, negative public opinion will be reduced, positively influencing the government’s support for smart factories and policy making.