Developed by Omocat and released in December 2020, OMORI is a surreal psychological horror role-playing game. The game follows the titular protagonist Omori as it examines such sensitive topics as suicide, grief, death, and depression. Such traumatic events are triggered in several planes of existence—White Space, Headspace, and Black Space—leading...
The Tijaniyya has witnessed a lively debate concerning the classic Sufi requirement of a living guide to give spiritual training (tarbiya) to aspirants. Prominent Tijani scholars across the Sahara—modern-day Morocco, Mauritania, and Senegal—have apparently staked different positions on this issue from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The discourse has...
Ideas of African cultural or racial distinction, most notably Négritude, largely have been dismissed as marginal to “ordinary” Africans, or the vast majority who did not have the opportunity to study in Paris or London and meet with ideologues of Black nationalism from the diaspora. Sub-Saharan African Muslims earlier responded...
For decades, the theory of cultural proximity, which states that audiences prefer culturally proximal content (Straubhaar, 1991), has remained a major framework to explain audience preferences. We show how transnational media flows have challenged its contemporary applicability. To probe this, we focus on a recent, intriguing, and still understudied development:...
State borders allocate access to basic goods, opportunities, rights, and protections along lines of nationality, race, and gender. However, the discriminatory effects of state borders rarely appear as an issue in the self-understanding of liberal-democratic societies and their political theorizing. In this paper, I explore how the category of nationality...
Self-determination is a central concept for political philosophers. For example, many have appealed to this concept to defend a right of states to restrict immigration. Because it is deeply embedded in our political structures, the principle possesses a kind of default authority and does not usually call for an elaborate...
In periods of political unrest, media habits change significantly, allowing for new patterns of selectivity. This study's main contribution lies in its application of selective exposure theory and its comparison of people's media uses in five Global South polities that witnessed widespread protests in 2019: Chile, Hong Kong, Iran, Iraq,...
Although the technical and psychological accuracy of the polygraph has been contested almost since the device’s inception, it continues to enjoy substantial popularity within law enforcement and federal agencies throughout North America. This paper excavates the sexual politics of the polygraph focused on two key arenas where the polygraph has...
Abstract
Purpose
This study examines the use of social media by individuals during protests in China (Hong Kong), Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon.
Method
Surveys in the four countries assess the relationship between people’s attitudes toward the protests and their selection bias on social media, manifested through selective sharing and selective...
This study examines selection bias on social media during the 2019 Lebanon protests. Based on the theoretical concepts of selective avoidance and selective sharing, the survey of a nationally representative probability sample found selective avoidance to occur across all social media. Among the various protest-related activities, sharing news was the...
Emerging digital entertainment media in the Global South are anchored in nation-state configurations, benefit from supranational affordances, and aspire to global operations. Drawing on Sassen’s “third spaces,” the article focuses on the case of Shahid, a Middle East-based video streaming platform and a hybrid media venture that operates at the...
What factors drive consumers to use artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots? The current study examined the associations among AI-powered chatbots’ anthropomorphism (human-likeness, animacy, and intelligence), social presence, imagery processing, psychological ownership, and continuance intention in the context of Human-AI-Interaction. Results from a path analysis using LISREL 8.54 show that consumers’ perceived...
Instagram not only offers an arena for the fulfillment of basic human desires but also cultivates new types of multifaceted desires and consumptions in Web 2.0 environments. This study aims to examine a wide variety of dispositional, psychological, and attitudinal predictors of Instagram consumption and selfie-and-groupfie cultures. Three cross-sectional surveys...
Advancements in experiential media (EM) technologies, particularly virtual reality (VR), a subset of EM, can transform the ways public relations (PR) professions tell stories about a brand, organization, or mega-events. In the context of sports, PR content productions utilize various qualities of EM to offer immersive at-home, arena-like experiences for...
In this study, we examine how and the degree to which Experiential Media (EM) are utilized to promote travel, sports, and, more broadly, cultural tourism in EM contents produced in the buildup to the 22nd FIFA World Cup to be hosted by Qatar in 2022, the first Arab nation to...
Drawing from social learning theory and the mobile advertising literature on key performance indicators (KPIs), two experiments examined the influence of peer users' conversion in mobile social commerce. Experiment 1 (N = 211, between-subjects [high vs. low number of “sold items”]) tested the effects of peer users' conversion, operationalized as...
Why do people give and help others in face of their own mortality salience? The existential struggle with the awareness of death impacts the gamut of human cognition, emotion, and behavior. This multi-method research (∑N = 1,219) explains the psychosocial impact of COVID-19-related mortality salience on altruism. Drawing from terror...
Drawing from the terror management theory (TMT) and evolutionary perspectives of Life-History Strategy, a between-subject online experiment examined the interaction effects of pre-existing death anxiety, fear-inducing media content (coronavirus threat vs. gun violence threat vs. low threat mental disorder), and intrasexual competition for mates on online dating intentions and social...
ABSTRACT
Purpose
The authors assess the effectiveness of campaigns designed to increase the sport activities of migrant workers in Qatar, host nation of the FIFA Men’s World Cup Qatar 2022TM.
Design
The authors used the integrative model of behavioral prediction (IM) as a guide and conducted ethnographic interviews with migrant...
About a century ago, women in the US and western Europe looked to ‘Turkish pantaloons’ (shalwar) for freedom and were shamed, harassed, and even arrested for wearing them. Meanwhile, people of all genders in Turkey and Bulgaria moved freely in shalwar until modern nation-building projects imposed Western restrictive dress that...