Social media have become important platforms for residents to engage with their neighborhood. This paper investigates two Facebook communities that focus in distinctly different ways on Amsterdam-Noord, a gentrifying neighborhood in Amsterdam. Dialogue on both Facebook communities is found to be thoroughly affective, but the kinds of emotions and the way such emotions are generated and shared differ. Through this analysis, this paper seeks to understand how “affective publics” emerge through a specific form of collaborative storytelling, characterized by tone, form as well as rhythm of online interaction. We show how the channeling of affective expression and attunement helps to build two dissimilar collaborative discourses of the neighborhood transformation. We propose the term online affective placemaking to study and articulate such processes. The term points to mediated feelings and urgency to engage, which bonds participants and impacts the social and political landscape within the neighborhood.
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Online social networks produce a visuality that reflects the attention economy governing this space. What is seen becomes elevated into prominence by networked publics that ‘perform’ affective expressions within platform affordances. We mapped Twitter images of refugees in two language spaces - English and Arabic. Using automated analysis and qualitative visual analysis, we found similar images circulating both spaces. However, photographs generating higher retweet counts were distinct. This highlights the impact of affective affordances of Twitter — in this case retweeting — on regimes of visibility in disparate spheres. Representations of refugees in the English language space were characterized by personalized, positive imagery, emphasizing solidarity for refugees contributing to their host country or stipulating innocence. Resonating images in the Arabic space were less personalized and depicted a more localized visuality of life in refugee camps, with an emphasis on living conditions in refugee camps and the efforts of aid organizations.
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In the era of social media, online reviews have become a crucial factor influencing the exposure of tourist destinations and the decision-making of potential tourists, exerting a profound impact on the sustainable development of these destinations. However, the influence of review valence on visit intention, especially the role of affective commitment and reputation (ability vs. responsibility), remains unclear. Drawing on emotion as a social information theory, this paper aims to elucidate the direct impact of different review valences on tourists’ visit intentions, as well as mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions. Three experiments indicate that positive (vs. negative) reviews can activate stronger affective commitment and visit intention, with affective commitment also playing a mediating role. Additionally, destination reputation significantly moderates the after-effects of review valences. More specifically, a responsibility reputation (compared with an ability reputation) weakens the effect of negative valence on affective commitment and visit intention. This study provides valuable theoretical insights into how emotional elements in online reviews influence the emotions and attitudes of potential tourists. Particularly for tourism managers, review valence and responsibility reputation hold practical significance in destination marketing.
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The past decades have shown an accelerated development of technology-enhanced or digital education. Although an important and recognized precondition for study success, still little attention has been paid to examining how an affective learning climate can be fostered in online training programs. Besides gaining insight into the dynamics of affective learning itself it is of vital importance to know what predicts trainees’ intention to transfer new knowledge and skills to other contexts. The present study investigated the influence of five affective learner characteristics from the transfer literature (learner readiness, motivation to learn, expected positive outcomes, expected negative outcomes, personal capacity) on trainees’ pre-training transfer intention. Participants were 366 adult students enrolled in an online course in information literacy in a distance learning environment. As information literacy is a generic competence, applicable in various contexts, we developed a novel multicontextual transfer perspective and investigated within one single study the influence of the abovementioned variables on pre-training transfer intention for both the students’ Study and Work contexts. The hypothesized model has been tested using structural equation modeling. The results showed that motivation to learn, expected positive personal outcomes, and learner readiness were the strongest predictors. Results also indicated the benefits of gaining pre-training insight into the specific characteristics of multiple transfer contexts, especially when education in generic competences is involved. Instructional designers might enhance study success by taking affective transfer elements and multicontextuality into account when designing digital education.
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Studying images in social media poses specific methodological challenges, which in turn have directed scholarly attention toward the computational interpretation of visual data. When analyzing large numbers of images, both traditional content analysis as well as cultural analytics have proven valuable. However, these techniques do not take into account the contextualization of images within a socio-technical environment. As the meaning of social media images is co-created by online publics, bound through networked practices, these visuals should be analyzed on the level of their networked contextualization. Although machine vision is increasingly adept at recognizing faces and features, its performance in grasping the meaning of social media images remains limited. Combining automated analyses of images with platform data opens up the possibility to study images in the context of their resonance within and across online discursive spaces. This article explores the capacities of hashtags and retweet counts to complement the automated assessment of social media images, doing justice to both the visual elements of an image and the contextual elements encoded through the hashtag practices of networked publics.
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Purpose Social media have become a key part of placemaking. Placemaking revolves around collaboration between multiple stakeholders, which requires ongoing two-way communication between local government and citizens. Although social media offer promising tools for local governments and public professionals in placemaking, they have not lived up to their potential. This paper aims to uncover the tensions and challenges that social media bring for public professionals at the street level in placemaking processes. Design/methodology/approach This study aims to fill this gap with a case study of area brokers engaged in online placemaking in Amsterdam. In total, 14 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted, focusing on area brokers’ social media practices, perceptions and challenges. The authors used an open coding strategy in the first phase of coding. In the second phase, the authors regrouped codes in thematic categories with the use of sensitizing concepts derived from the theoretical review. Findings The use of social media for placemaking imposes demands on area brokers from three sides: the bureaucracy, the affordances of social media and affective publics. The paper unpacks pressures area brokers are under and the (emotional) labour they carry out to align policy and bureaucratic requirements with adequate communication needed in neighbourhood affairs on social media. The tensions and the multidimensionality of what is required explain the reluctance of area brokers to exploit the potential of social media in their work. Originality/value Several studies have addressed the use of social media in placemaking, but all neglected the perspective of street-level bureaucrats who shape the placemaking process in direct contact with citizens.
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Dit proefschrift onderzoekt de manieren waarop affectieve reacties op lichamen met een handicap worden gerepresenteerd en hoe dit ons uitnodigt om deze lichamen esthetisch te lezen. Ik stel dat deze affectieve impact begrepen kan worden als een ‘affordance’, een term die ik gebruik om te beschrijven hoe de verschijning van en interactie met gehandicapte lichamen affectieve reacties teweegbrengt, zoals angst, verwondering of walging. Ik bestudeer de relatie tussen representatie en affectieve reacties via literatuur en andere kunstvormen. Door middel van close readings van literaire teksten en kunstwerken biedt dit proefschrift een alternatief voor het zogenaamde modeldenken - een benadering die categorisering benadrukt. In plaats daarvan stel ik een lezing voor die zich richt op hoe lichamelijke capaciteiten cultureel en sociaal vertaald worden in (on)vermogens. In tegenstelling tot taxonomische benaderingen die categoriseren en generaliseren, maakt deze methode het mogelijk om van het bijzondere naar het private te gaan. Kunstwerken, hoewel vatbaar voor generalisatie, benadrukken hun uniciteit en weerstaan categorisering. Door te analyseren hoe verschillende kunstvormen gehandicapte lichamen representeren, geeft dit proefschrift een nieuwe dimensie aan het begrijpen van onze emotionele reacties en de esthetische waardering van lichamelijke diversiteit.
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As multifunctional places that combine shopping and hospitality with public space and residential functions, urban consumption spaces are sites where different normative orders surface and sometimes clash. In Amsterdam, such a clash emerged over touristification of consumption spaces, eroding place attachment for local residents and urging the city government to take action. Based on policy analysis and interviews with entrepreneurs and key informants, we demonstrate how Amsterdam’s city government is responding to this issue, using legal pluralism that exists within formal state law. Specifically, the city government combines four instruments to manage touristification of consumption spaces, targeting so-called tourist shops with the aim to drive them out of the inner city. This strategic combination of policy instruments designed on various scales and for different publics to pursue a local political goal jeopardizes entrepreneurs’ rights to legal certainty. Moreover, implicitly based on class-based tastes and distrust towards particular minority groups of entrepreneurs, this policy strategy results in institutional discrimination that has far-reaching consequences for entrepreneurs in itself, but also affects trust relations among local stakeholders.
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In general, people are poorly protected against cyberthreats, with the main reason being user behaviour. For the study described in this paper, a ques-tionnaire was developed in order to understand how people’s knowledge of and attitude towards both cyberthreats and cyber security controls affect in-tention to adopt cybersecure behaviour. The study divides attitude into a cog-nitive and an affective component. Although only the cognitive component of attitude is usually studied, the results from a questionnaire of 300 respond-ents show that both the affective and cognitive components of attitude have a clearly positive, albeit varying, influence on behavioural intention, with the affective component having an even greater effect on attitude than the cog-nitive aspect. No correlation was found between knowledge and behavioural intention. The results indicate that attitude is an important factor to include when developing behavioural interventions, but also that different kinds of attitude should be addressed differently in interventions.
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In recent years, numerous environmental psychology studies have demonstrated that contact with nature as opposed to urban settings can improve an individual’s mood, can lead to increased levels of vitality, and can offer an opportunity to recover from stress. According to Attention Restoration Theory (ART) the restorative potential of natural environments is situated in the fact that nature can replenish depleted attentional resources. This replenishment takes place, in part, because nature is deemed to be a source of fascination, with fascination being described as having an ‘‘attentional’’, an‘‘affective’’ and an ‘‘effort’’ dimension. However, the claim that fascination with nature involves these three dimensions is to a large extent based on intuition or derived from introspection-based measurement methods, such as self-reports. In three studies, we aimed to more objectively assess whether these three dimensions indeed applied to experiences related to natural environments, before any (attentional) depletion has taken place. The instruments that were used were: (a) the affect misattribution procedure (Study 1), (b) the dot probe paradigm (Study 2) and (c) a cognitively effortful task (Study 3).These instrument were respectively aimed at verifying the affective, attentional and effort dimension of fascination. Overall, the results provide objective evidence for the claims made within the ART framework, that natural as opposed to urban settings are affectively positive (cfr., affective dimension) and that people have an attentional bias to natural (rather than urban) environments (cfr., attentional dimension). The results regarding the effort dimension are less straightforward, and suggest that this dimension only becomes important in sufficiently difficult cognitive tasks.
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