This study examines horror film posters, an essential tool in a film promotional campaign, to investigate how the genre’s central appeal of horror is constructed within the constraints of a single static page to “sell” the film. A metafunctional analysis is conducted on 20 top-grossing American horror film posters, using Kress and van Leeuwen (2021) visual grammar for visual images and Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2014) systemic functional linguistics for taglines. Focusing on visual character depiction, image-viewer relations, and tagline analysis, the article indicates that although visual images and taglines appear independent with limited correlation between the two transitivity systems, these two components employ similar strategies to construct horror, which are: provocation, viewer involvement, and heightened realism. These common strategies suggest a special way of interaction between the two modes: they convey a unified concept without explicitly repeating information. These strategies also reflect a subtler approach to horror that shifts the focus from external horror to internal psychological disturbance, making the posters more interactive, aesthetically appealing, and suitable for public display.
This study examines the gap between the real self and the virtual self (avatar) among social media users inBahrain. Using a qualitative approach, it analyzes in-depth accounts from 25 Bahraini youth aged 18 to 35 years to explore how individuals construct and negotiate digital identities. The findings reveal a significant disparity between the real and virtual self: 48% of participants reported only partial alignment, while 36% reported no alignment between their real and virtual identities. Participants consistently described virtual identities as idealised, selective, and often detached from everyday reality. While these digital self-presentations were associated with psychological benefits, such as increased self-confidence and temporary stress relief, they also generated psychological strain, particularly due to the pressure to maintain idealised images and manage fragmented forms of self-representation. These findings highlight the ambivalent nature of constructing a virtual identity, presenting it as a potential source of psychological tension as well as a resource for self-enhancement.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is now embedded in the production of social media visuals. However, research has concentrated on production processes rather than audience outcomes, and empirical work in the Arab context remains scarce. This study examines how AI-generated visual design is adopted by creative professionals, deployed by institutions, and understood by those practitioners to affect user behaviour. Nine semi-structured interviews were conducted in Bahrain with three purposively sampled groups: content creators, institutional representatives, and specialists. Audience response was therefore accessed through practitioner accounts rather than through direct user data. Interviews were analysed thematically in MAXQDA against a ten-theme framework, yielding 223 coded paragraphs. Three key findings emerge. Adoption is task-contingent rather than scalar, ranging from no reliance on purely graphic work to 80% reliance on institutional video, with time-saving the dominant motivation while claims about creativity are consistently hedged. Verification of AI output is not a single ethical competence but a family of domain-specific capacities derived from each institution's own accountability regime. Practitioners across sectors and languages independently reported that content depicting people outperforms AI-generated alternatives, suggesting that established attention and identification mechanisms constrain substitution. Claims concerning users are practitioner-reported and require corroboration through direct audience research.
The media's portrayal of ethnic conflicts in Sudan influences the levels of enmity and peace; yet existing investigations have mainly drawn on a few descriptive case studies, which almost entirely ignore the situations of journalists, human rights workers, and lawyers, and have only occasionally resorted to quantitative methods. This research work investigates the extent to which a combination of media framing, media accessibility and reach, and media credibility and trust could predict the mitigation of tribal conflicts as practiced by Sudanese journalists, human rights defenders, and lawyers. A cross-sectional survey design was used with a sample selected from 120 Sudanese journalists, human rights activists, and lawyers who had very close, hands-on professional experience with tribal conflict reporting. The data were collected by questionnaire in five parts, which have been validated; a Likert scale of 5 points was used for the measurement of media framing, accessibility, credibility, reduction of hate speech, as well as inter-tribal dialogue, and then analyzed using Cronbach's alpha, correlation, and multiple regression in SPSS. The three variables taken together explain over a third (30.3%) of the mitigation of tribal conflicts, significantly and jointly (R² = .303; F(3, 116) = 16.848, p < .001). Trust and credibility in media were the most powerful predictor (β = .407, p < .001), followed by framing in the media (β = .271, p = .001) and accessibility and reach of the media (β = .156, p = .048); the collinearity diagnostics indicated no presence of multicollinearity among the predictors.
This study examines the relationship between platform affordances, digital engagement, and political participation among young social media users. While existing literature often assumes that technological features inherently facilitate civic and political engagement, this study challenges the notion of a direct effect of platform affordances and instead emphasizes the role of user practices. Using a quantitative approach, data were collected through an online survey of 100 young social media users and analyzed using multiple regression. The results show that platform affordances do not have a significant direct effect on political participation, whereas digital engagement emerges as a strong predictor. These findings indicate that active interaction with content, rather than the mere availability of technological features, plays a central role in shaping participatory outcomes. The descriptive analysis further reveals a gap between exposure and engagement: although users frequently encounter political content, their level of active interaction remains uneven. This suggests that exposure alone is insufficient to generate meaningful participation. This study contributes to the literature by proposing a distinction between affordance availability and affordance activation, highlighting digital engagement as the key mechanism linking technological environments to political behavior. By shifting attention from platform features to user practices, the study offers a more practice-oriented perspective on digital political participation.
