Serial Readers United

Author(s):  
Ildiko Kaposi ◽  
Shahd Al-Shammari

Abstract Through an exploration of Kuwait’s independent bookstores, the article challenges the reputation of Gulf Arab monarchies as generally lacking a reading culture. It treats independent bookstores as urban spaces designed to enable participation in the practices and rituals of reading books and as indicators of reading microcultures in the country. Run by readers and writers, independent bookstores fill a gap in the cultural landscape in order to cultivate highbrow readership. They nurture emerging communities of readers, creating intimate spaces that blur the boundaries of public and private. They balance art and commerce to assume roles as arbiters of taste, community centers, and literary-cultural societies. Aided by social media, their activities spill over into the wider community and expand beyond the borders of Kuwait, attesting to the resilience of historical patterns of the Arab world of letters and the emergence of the Gulf as a new center in the circuit.

2020 ◽  
Vol 01 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Han

: Social media is increasingly used as a platform by medical providers. The positive contribution is also balanced by risks and governed by codes of professionalism by the medical community. The values of medical professionalism include universal tenets and also those unique to the Arab world and the United Arab Emirates. We propose that institutional guidelines and self governance in the medical community is important, as well as further dialogue on this important subject.


2021 ◽  
pp. 101269022110141
Author(s):  
Eunhye Yoo

This study explores the influence and sociocultural meaning of self-management of South Korean sports stars in the context of their social media activity. The study utilizes netnography to analyze social media posts to determine the meaning of sports stars’ self-management. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with study participants. Ten South Korean sports stars, who are active users of Instagram, were selected as the study participants. Photographs, videos, and stories from their accounts—around 1800 posts in total—were analyzed. The results indicated that the sports stars attempted to share their daily lives on social media to build a close relationship with the public. Moreover, they used their accounts to publicize their commercialized selves and to promote their sponsors. They uploaded only strictly composed and curated posts on their accounts as a form of self-censorship. Finally, it was determined that digital labor was used for self-management on social media, where there is no distinction between public and private territory. A sports star has become a self-living commercial today, and self-management is now a prerequisite for survival. Thus, self-management on social media has become a requirement for sports stars.


Author(s):  
Ana Novakov

New Utopian plans for liberated urban spaces emerged during the post-war era with the work of the Lettrist (LI), Situationist International (SI), and specifically Constant Nieuwenhuys, a Dutch painter turned architect and sculptor who understood urban planning as intimately linked to nomadism, play and creativity. Influenced by the bombed detritus of European capitals and the possibilities of new technology, Constant’s plans for a future society were post-revolutionary, with unseen automated factory production and spaces for innovation that were elevated on stilts. Constant’s conflicting ideas are referenced and emulated in Black Rock City – a short-term encampment erected every year for the Burning Man festival in the desert of Nevada. These multileveled zones would allow for the blurring of public and private space as well as zones of work and leisure. Article received: December 12, 2016; Article accepted: January 10, 2017; Published online: Aprile 20, 2017Original scholarly paperHow to cite this article: Novakov, Anna. "Mapping Utopias: From New Babylon to Black Rock City." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 12 (2017): 9-16.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002204262110414
Author(s):  
Robyn Vanherle ◽  
Kathleen Beullens ◽  
Hanneke Hendriks

Go-along interviews among adolescents ( N = 26, M age = 16.31, SD = .83) were conducted to examine how adolescents interpret alcohol posts in terms of appropriateness and how this, in turn, plays a role in adolescents’ reactions toward alcohol posts on public and private social media entries. The findings of this study, first, indicate that alcohol posts were classified as appropriate or inappropriate based on the amount of alcohol and the displayed behavior in the post. Second, most posts, including inappropriate ones, received positive or no feedback. Moreover, adolescents deliberately seemed to withhold negative feedback out of fear of being misjudged by peers. Still, negative reactions were expressed more quickly in safer off- and online environments (i.e., face-to-face conversation and online chat messages) because they were visible to close friends only. This is important in view of prevention as it unravels the interesting role of private environments in stimulating negative interpersonal communication.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kumaran Kanapathipillaii

<p>Social media such as Facebook has become an essential strategic tool for organisations. Facebook is a platform where a large pool of consumers would use to make purchase decisions. Organisations are designing and maintaining their Facebook account to expand their social networks and build relationships with the public. This research explains current situations regarding the influence of online social media technology with reference to Facebook on employees' work performance in Malaysia. The problem statement focuses on both the public and private sectors in Malaysia. Additionally, various literature was reviewed, indicating the relationship between social media (usage at work, sociability, and trust) and work performance. The mediating role of the organisational framework on the relationship between online social media technology (Facebook) and work performance was also scrutinised to formulate the research hypothesis. The findings of this research established a significant relationship between online social media (Facebook) and organisational framework and work performance. Conclusively, the hypothesis depicted that the organisational framework fully mediates the relationship between online social media technology (Facebook) and employees' work performance in public and private sectors in Malaysia. This study also verifies that both the public and private sector organisations that incorporate Facebook can enhance networking and information sharing, influencing employees' work performance, creating a stable organisational framework, generating value for customers, and improving employee relationships with all stakeholders. In conclusion, work performance can be heightened by a well planned and structured organisational framework. Additionally, through a well planned and implemented online social media technology such as Facebook, an organisation would have a smooth operating organisational framework and a workforce with enhanced performance.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0854/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2S11) ◽  
pp. 3089-3095

Indian banking sector is going through a massive transformation day by day with the advancement of Information and communication Technology and impact of digitization in the banking industry. After the core banking system, banks have moved further to reap the benefits of internet and mobile banking. In order to engage more customers anywhere and anytime without visiting the brick and mortar branches, the banks have now introduced the social media banking. Most of the people are already active in different social media platforms, so banks have grabbed that opportunity to reach people easily and provide services through social media. This paper has made an attempt to analyze the engagement of social media customers in different banks including public and private sector with reference to facebook bank page. The results show that most of the banks have presence on popular social media platforms. With respect to the engagement of customer to all facebook posts during the study period, public sector banks are posting more on their respective facebook page but the customers’ likes as well as dislikes are more for SBI, ICICI and AXIS. In case of shares and comments, SBI and PNB have more and are increasing continuously as these two banks post more on their respective facebook pages. But with respect to customer engagement per facebook post during the study period, customers are engaged more with private sector banks. And it can be said that regarding overall customer engagement people are more engaged with private sector over public sector banks.


Author(s):  
M.S. Parvathi ◽  

Burton Pike (1981) terms the cityscapes represented in literature as word-cities whose depiction captures the spatial significance evoked by the city-image and simultaneously, articulates the social psychology of its inhabitants (pp. 243). This intertwining of the social and the spatial animates the concept of spatiality, which informs the positionality of urban subjects, (be it the verticality of the city or the horizonality of the landscape) and determines their standpoint (Keith and Pile, 1993). The spatial politics underlying cityscapes, thus, determine the modes of social production of sexed corporeality. In turn, the body as a cultural product modifies and reinscribes the urban landscape according to its changing demographic needs. The dialectic relationship between the city and the bodies embedded in them orient familial, social, and sexual relations and inform the discursive practices underlying the division of urban spaces into public and private domains. The geographical and social positioning of the bodies within the paradigm of the public/private binary regulates the process of individuation of the bodies into subjects. The distinction between the public and the private is deeply rooted in spatial practices that isolate a private sphere of domestic, embodied activity from the putatively disembodied political, public sphere. Historically, women have been treated as private and embodied and the politics of the demarcated spaces are employed to control and limit women’s mobility. This gendered politics underlying the situating practices apropos public and private spaces inform the representations of space in literary texts. Manu Joseph’s novels, Serious Men (2010) and The Illicit Happiness of Other People (2012), are situated in the word-cities of Mumbai and Chennai respectively whose urban spaces are structured by such spatial practices underlying the politics of location. The paper attempts to problematize the nature of gendered spatializations informing the location of characters in Serious Men and The Illicit Happiness of Other People.


Author(s):  
Javier Ruiz Sánchez ◽  
María José Martínez Sánchez

Cities evolve to just possible, always uncertain urban futures, achieving complexity so this complexity becomes itself the best tool to face uncertainty. The main operation in urban systems evolution is difference, the establishment of traces indicating differences, differences themselves consisting of increasingly more complex systems of rules, like a game board. Differences operate both in space and time, conforming to a cultural landscape, a cityscape. It is in this context where the authors present the concept of sensitive bodies. Urban spaces highly internalise processes due to a collective memory of past events, whose complexity can be read through both a hermeneutical approach to form and a sensitive approach to topology, the underlying system of rules that can be read just by playing the game, using techniques borrowed out of performing arts, making bodies interact with living bodies whose behaviour is just the main component of the cityscape.


Author(s):  
Nelson Botello

In this chapter, the symbolic cultural dimension of technology and surveillance technologies in two cities and two commercial centers in central Mexico will be explored, especially the various Closed Circuit Television Systems (CCTV). This will allow the analysis of the way in which these technologies have made viable specific ways of sorting and governance of public and private spaces in the country. This document then examines the relationship established between the symbolic meanings given to these surveillance technologies in said urban spaces. Included is a series of observations and interviews of those in charge of these systems.


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