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The purpose of this research is to explore how an industry is represented in multimodal public media narratives and to explore how this representation subsequently affects the formation of public sense-giving space during a persisting crisis, such as a pandemic. The question asked is: how do the use of multimodality by public service media dynamically shape representations of industry identity during a persisting crisis?

This study made use of a multimodal approach. The verbal and visual media text on the restaurant industry during the COVID-19 pandemic that were published in Finland by the public service media distributor Yle were studied. Data published between March 2020 and March 2022 were analysed. The data consisted of 236 verbal texts, including 263 visuals.

Three narratives were identified– victim, servant and survivor – that construct power relations and depict the identity of the restaurant industry differently. It was argued that multimodal media narratives hold three meaning making functions: sentimentalizing, juxtaposing and nuancing industry characteristics. It was also argued that multimodal public service media narratives have wider implications in possibly shaping the future attractiveness of the industry and organizational members' understanding of their identity.

This research contributes to sensemaking literature in that it explores the role of power – explicitly or implicitly constructed through media narratives during crisis. Furthermore, this research contributes to sensemaking literature in that it shows how narratives take shape multimodally during a continuous crisis, and how this impacts the construction of industry identity.

The purpose of this study is to explore how vulnerable healthcare consumers foster social support through visual storytelling in social media in navigating healthcare consumption experiences.

This study employs a dual qualitative approach of visual and textual analysis of 180 Instagram posts from female breast cancer patients and survivors who use the platform to narrate their healthcare consumption experiences.

This study demonstrates how visual storytelling on social media normalises hidden aspects of healthcare consumption experiences through healthcare disclosures (procedural, corporeal, recovery), normalising practices (providing learning resources, cohering the illness experience, problematising mainstream recovery narratives) and enabling digital affordances, which in turn facilitates social support among vulnerable healthcare consumers.

This study highlights the potential for visual storytelling on social media to address shortcomings in the healthcare service system and contribute to societal well-being through co-creative efforts that offer real-time and customised support for vulnerable healthcare consumers.

This research highlights that visual storytelling on image-based social media offers transformative possibilities for vulnerable healthcare consumers seeking social support in negotiating the challenges of their healthcare consumption experiences.

This study presents a framework of visual storytelling for vulnerable healthcare consumers on image-based social media. Our paper offers three key contributions: that visual storytelling fosters informational and companionship social support for vulnerable healthcare consumers; recognising this occurs through normalising hidden healthcare consumption experiences; and identifying healthcare disclosures, normalising practices and enabling digital affordances as fundamental to this process.

Drawn from the concepts of processing fluency and mental imagery, the present study aims to fill the void by developing the mechanism underlying consumers' cognitive processing of visually appealing digital content in social media (i.e. Instagram) of retail brands.

Data were gathered using a web-based survey method with consumers residing in the USA (N = 328). Structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed to investigate the proposed hypotheses. In addition, measurement invariance and multigroup analyses were conducted to test the moderation effect of need for cognition (NFC).

The results supported the pivotal role of mental imagery when consumers process visual messages in the context of a retail brand's Instagram. Both comprehension fluency and imagery fluency positively influence mental imagery, which in turn cultivates positive attitude towards the brand. The mediating role of mental imagery is confirmed. Furthermore, individuals' NFC interacts with imagery fluency but not with comprehension fluency such that high NFC strengthens the effect of imagery fluency on mental imagery. That is, when high-NFC consumers process information on Instagram, their perceptions of ease of generating imagery likely evoke visual representation of the brand's messages on Instagram in their minds.

This research provides feasible ways for brands to increase the effectiveness of digital marketing communications in social media (e.g. optimising of the contextual features of visual information and employing interactive features such as filters of social media to enhance processing fluency).

Within the context of digital retailing, this study provides a new perspective of consumers' imagery processing to investigate the effectiveness of visual-focussed messages.

Images had long conveyed politics through forms as varied as private paintings and public coins. If images are storytelling vectors (Fusari, 2017), visual artefacts were intended to re/shape human perception of current events and, consequently, their states of ‘being in the world’ (Heidegger, 2001); this is the reason why the visual quality of communication might be hard to disjoin from that of ‘performativity’ (Cartier-Bresson, 2018).

The polysemic (Barthes, 1977), if not fully open (Eco, 1989), quality of visual semiotics complicates identification of any framework of reference and adds to the need for practical and sensible research in digital communication (Fusari, in press).

Since the first US Presidential debate televised in 1968, a new interest surged towards the understanding and production of visual communication of politics. Increasingly so, images (both still and moving ones) have affected, if not thoroughly shaped, understanding of all recent political affairs, particularly so from the 1992's Gulf War onward (Baudrillard, 1995; Kellner, 1992).

The 2012 Invisible Children (IC)'s campaign is here assessed as the milestone marking the potential for global impact acquired by socio-political visual-centred storytelling.

The intertwining of the digital with the visual has yet to be precisely arranged for socio-political storytelling; also, storytelling as a format and approach has increasingly gained relevance, adding new concerns to issues of veracity.

In response, this chapter advances the notion of ‘storyline’ in conjunction with that of ‘storytelling’: the resulting taxonomy aims to review specific notions of truth- and trust-fulness from a visual-centred perspective.

The chapter thus explores the requirements for communicating and understanding visual storytelling on digital media; by doing so, it addresses the extent to which ‘visual storytelling’ might be a notion fit for the job of disseminating today's digital cultures.

Eventually, the chapter will question how to design visually centred communication formats and, in turn, engage these as storytelling of socio-political issues for digital platforms.

The chapter reviews recent evidence of, and debates about, the integration of art, entertainment, and media in media portrayals (e.g., movies, photographs, theater, music, performance art, museums, story-telling, modifications of an environmental space, social media, painting, comics, dance, videogames, etc.) of climate change based on three sources of data: 1) articles listed in academic reference databases and Google Scholar, 2) online sites, and 3) climate change news images. 1) Retrieved articles discuss both the potential and challenges of communicating about climate change through art, entertainment, and media. However, research is inconsistent on and in some cases is critical of the nature and extent of effects of art-based climate communication. 2) The Internet is a rich and diverse source of websites and videos about climate change. We analyzed 49 sites based on the art medium or form discussed, the primary content related to climate change, and the apparent goal of the site or video. The most frequent goals were promote action, collaboration, raise awareness, climate change communication, discussion, empowerment, reshape public perception, and engagement. 3) Based on the major themes and frames identified through content and cluster analysis of 350 images associated with 200 news articles from 11 US newspaper and magazine sources through late 2009, we summarize the theme of art and mass media representations of the environment, and how those are associated with the other major themes. We conclude by suggesting promising areas for future research on the intersection of art and science in communicating about climate change.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of politicians’ facial attractiveness on their online popularity as reflected in audience engagement with their Facebook posts during the 2015 Israeli election campaign.

Using Israel’s 2015 election campaign as the case study, the authors analyzed all messages posted (n=501) on 33 politicians’ official Facebook pages during the week leading to Election Day.

The results demonstrate that audiences do engage more with posts of the more facially attractive politicians. These posts generated more shares, more comments and more participants in their discussions – but not more likes – relative to posts of less attractive politicians. These effects became even stronger when the posts were accompanied by one or more visual image, and remained significant even after controlling for other engagement predictors, such as a politician’s gender, seniority or the timing of a post’s publication.

The findings emphasize the importance of attractive looks for politicians. The findings highlight that attractive politicians’ posts attract more attention, allowing them to better spread their ideas. Thus, politicians should aim to post aesthetic images and visuals to promote better engagement with their ideas on social media.

The study expands our understanding of online presentations of politicians, focusing on the effect of politicians’ facial attractiveness on their online popularity. Recent studies have demonstrated that physically attractive politicians enjoy more and better media attention on television news, but not in non-visual media such as radio and newspapers. This effect has not been examined in the social media environment, a central arena for today’s political debates and one that involves many visual messages.

This paper aims to examine the effects of visual themes and view perspectives on users’ visual attention to brand posts on Instagram. The impact of visual attention on brand attitude and recognition is also explored.

The authors conducted a 4 (visual themes: customer-centric, employee-centric, product-centric and symbolic visuals) × 2 (view perspectives: first-person view vs third-person view) between-subject factorial eye-tracking experiment to explore their effects on viewers’ visual attention (fixation frequency and fixation duration), attitude toward the brand and brand recognition.

Results showed that, under a first-person view, participants spent the longest time viewing customer-centric images and paid the most attention to product-centric and customer-centric images. For images in the third-person view, product-centric images received the longest fixation duration and highest fixation frequency. Customer-centric image and product-centric image generated significantly higher amount of fixation duration and fixation frequency than the symbolic image, regardless of view perspective. Brand recognition was positively influenced by fixation frequency but not by fixation duration.

This study is an extended application of Aaker’s (1996) brand identity planning model in visual branding on Instagram. As the findings indicated, the effective use of visual strategies could lead to more positive responses toward the brand. By understanding how optical elements stimulate visual branding processing, marketing professionals will be able to improve information designing skills in visual-based social media platforms (such as Instagram).

The study aims to explore why consumers engage with ordinary celebrities on social media by identifying the influential characteristics that have engaged followers and have led to opinion leadership on visual platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook.

Qualitative data were collected from 32 social media users following at least one ordinary celebrity on Instagram and Facebook in Qatar and Tunisia.

The findings of this study highlight five main characteristics that lead to fame and opinion leadership on social media visual platforms: credibility, storytelling and content quality, fit with the platform, Actual and aspired image homophily and consistency.

This research is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, one of the first studies that highlight the features determining opinion leadership on visual platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. Second, the results of the study highlight some features that distinguish ordinary celebrities from traditional established celebrities.

The findings of this research represent a guideline for effective influential marketing development. Based on the results, recommendations are provided for companies, influencers and social media users who aspire to become influencers.

This research, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is among the first to shed light on opinion leadership through ordinary celebrities on visual social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, and thus, adds new insights to the area of social media marketing.

Purpose: This project examines both the media practice of covering perp walks and the discourse of perp walks as performative rituals, with the goal of understanding how grounded practice shapes meaning.

Methodology/approach: This project combines ethnographic observation and interview research to explore the grounded experience of perp walk participants, including journalists, law enforcement, and defendants.

Findings: The analysis suggests that perp walks are constructions that serve the interests of the state and that their resulting images are not neutral documents. Visual journalists are managed by law enforcement through embodied gatekeeping in practice and experience pressure from newsrooms to capture a particular moment. Defendants report feeling violated because they are unable to control the discourse of their recontextualized image.

Research limitations: As a qualitative-research project using a non-representative sample, the study results cannot be generalized, but they instead offer a rich understanding of embodied practice.

Originality/value: Because this study offers the subjective perspectives of three sets of stakeholders, including journalists, law enforcement, and defendants, it offers a unique and in-depth analysis of perp walks as media ritual.