Journal of Creative Communications

We propose that emotional responses to a media stimulus (e.g., a news article), in addition to presumed influence, can help explain one’s evaluation of the media stimulus. Our model was evaluated using data collected from 261 college students who read a news article discussing the harmful effects of multitasking. Structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis revealed that the participants’ emotional feelings (i.e., anger, guilt and happiness) after reading the message and perceptions of how professors and administrators’ perceived the researchers interviewed in the article directly predicted the evaluation of the news article. Presumed influence of the news article on neutral Americans and professors and administrators on campus did not directly predict participants’ evaluation of the news article, the influence of which was mediated by anger. Message evaluation and select emotions explained 58 per cent and 26 per cent of the variance in supporting publication of the article and intentions to avoid multitasking, respectively. Results support the inclusion of emotional responses in news evaluation research.

Email advertising has evolved from simple text, untargeted mass mailings to visually sophisticated, highly targeted, permission-based interactive communication for non-profit organizations. This study employed a self-administered survey method to collect data from 400 participants, randomly selected from 1,806 supporters of a National Public Radio (NPR; KTEP-FM) station in El Paso. A total of 106 responses was received. Several linear regression models were run and showed that NPR members’ innovativeness variables significantly predicted their attitudes towards email advertising (F = 5.86, p < 0.01). β coefficients further demonstrated that the more technologies and online activities NPR members adopt, the more positive their attitudes towards email advertising will be. Results also showed that NPR members’ innovativeness (measured by their online activities) negatively predict their attitudes towards postal direct mail advertising. β coefficient demonstrated that the more online activities NPR members undertook, the less favourable their attitudes towards postal direct mail advertising were. Similar results were found for NPR members’ preference of postal direct mail advertising (F = 3.76, p < 0.05). Online activities also negatively predicted NPR members’ preference of direct mail postal advertising as shown by β coefficient in the regression model. The study also discussed managerial implications for non-profit organizations to better use email advertising.

On 8 December 2013, a group of foreign construction workers (FCWs) were involved in a confrontation with the police in the Little India neighbourhood of Singapore after the death of a worker in a vehicle accident. The confrontation was framed as the ‘Little India riot’ in The Straits Times, the most widely read newspaper in Singapore, often referred to as a state apparatus serving as a tool for nation building. Drawing upon framing theory, we analyze articles published in The Straits Times covering the ‘Little India riot’ over the period of a year. Our thematic analysis suggests that the newspaper framed the workers as ‘rioters’, connecting the riot to alcohol and street justice as a trait of the Indian culture, offering a cultural explanation for the underlying factors stirring and shaping the confrontation. The framing of the workers as criminals also justified increased surveillance and control of FCWs as safety measures to preserve Singapore’s security and national image as an investment and tourism destination. The news stories also presented multiple viewpoints regarding the handling of the riot and subsequent policy responses, allowing room for contesting opinions in the mediated public sphere. Left absent in the frames were the alternative narratives grounded in the voices of the FCWs.

This article will examine the redevelopment plan of the Bhadra Fort precincts (the Bhadra Plaza) in the walled city of Ahmedabad to understand the city’s projection of its neoliberal visual ability to produce the symbol and space of global habitude. The Bhadra Fort is the citadel, the ceremonial centre of the city of Ahmedabad that Ahmed Shah founded in 1411. Over the years, as the city of Ahmedabad grew and expanded its city limits, this inner core of the city came to be perceived as a site of disease, communal conflict and general residential decline. The Bhadra project promises to transform the fort precincts into a site of leisure and a source of economic revitalization.

I critically trace the rationale of this project taken up by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and Archaeological Survey of India that articulates the seamless integration of the walled city with the rest of the ‘developed’ parts of Ahmedabad. I show that this integration is envisaged as consequent to the complete pedestrianization of the Bhadra Plaza. I argue that the project erases the materiality of its historical space and the history of its use. Unlike de Certeau’s pedestrian whose ways of seeing offered a critique to the hegemony of the planner’s eye, the figure of the pedestrian is now co-opted into the imagination of the Bhadra Plaza.

The use of social media received a lot of ‘buzz’ due to the Arab Spring because of the events that unfurled in the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, among other places. However, although not as dramatic as overthrowing a current regime, the use of social media has been revolutionary in most areas of the Middle East, especially the most conservative societies that have been relatively closed to information that flowed without constraint. Saudi Arabia, for example, now has the largest growing Twitter community of all the nations in the Arabian Gulf. Known for its tight rein on public discourse and the flow of information, even elements of the current regime are opening doors to a new public discourse in large part due to the influence of social media. This project will explore the social media phenomenon that has had such an impact on the relatively closed societies of the Arab world, specifically on how it has changed the nature of public. The researcher used content analysis of four Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) journalist accounts and surveyed online research publications related to the subject from two different library databases that included hundreds of peer-reviewed academic journals. Also, the researcher conducted online keyword searches for information about research publications on the subject. The article concluded that the use of Twitter is shifting the Arab people discourse and opinion in the kingdom because those opinions are being heard instead of censored. Social media is having a major impact on the conservative Saudi, Qatar and UAE societies.