The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how museums use Augmented Reality (AR) to enhance communication services with their audiences and attract new ones. Still, there is no definite answer to how young audiences perceive the educational effects of experiencing this augmented space of communication as an immersive medium. This study is based on a survey of 400 students after they visited an AR technology-enhanced exhibition held by a local history museum. Two stimulus–response marketing scale metrics, widely used to assess TV commercials, were adapted for AR experiences and validated. The mediation analysis revealed an intervening emotional mechanism, in which the multisensory AR experience has educational effects through entertainment and empathy. An improved stimulus–response empirical model is proposed, in which AR technologies, as environmental multisensory stimuli, produce cognitive responses through emotional immersion. The findings have significance in improving how museums encode their message using AR technologies as a secondary communication medium with young audiences. This study could help museum professionals and application developers to find AR implementation solutions as service tools to enhancing user experience by using a widely tested scale for evaluating TV commercials applied to measure AR experiences.

Places have been promoting their attractions throughout history for almost a century now and place marketing started capturing the attention of economic researchers in the early 1990s. Although the globalized space has become a major interdisciplinary field of study in the past few decades, we still do not have a definite solution for measuring or predicting the changes it brings. The aim of this study is to propose an instrument to help scholars quantify the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 components of the online presence of place brands and their spatial dynamics in a broader global context. By taking the ‘space of flows’ approach to frame globalization, we questioned whether geography is still destiny in the context of online place branding communication. To answer the question, we developed a category grid and applied it in the content analysis of 82 official country websites. We found that geographical position is still important in conditioning the adoption of Web 1.0, and does not make a significant difference in the adoption of Web 2.0. However, the strongest predictors of the adoption of Web 1.0 are not the ones related to geography, but to socio-economic inequality. It is therefore possible for the theorizations of the advantages of the ‘space of flows’ globalization to be suitable only for Web 2.0, Web 1.0 still being under the influence of the ‘space of place’. We discussed the implications of adopting the network society theory in place branding communication in order to nuance the understanding of the transitions from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 in place marketing.

The last two decades have seen a growing trend towards the research of voting behavior in post-communist countries. Urban sociology theorists state that not only space structures influence political participation, but also space structures are changing under the influence of global, local, and individual factors. The growing role played by information in the globalised world has accelerated the paradigm shift in urban sociology: from central place model (based on urban-rural distinction and on monocentric metropolitan areas) to network society (based on space of flows and polycentric metropolitan areas). However, recent studies have mainly focused on countries with solid democracies, rather than on former communist countries. The present study aims to analyze the extent to which a new emerging spatial structure can be envisaged within a metropolitan area of Romania and its consequences for the political dimensions of social capital. The Transilvania University Ethics Commission approved this study (S1 Aprouval). The research is based upon individual and aggregate empirical data, collected from the areas adjacent to the core city in Brașov metropolitan area. Individual data has been collected during October 2012, using the oral survey technique (S1 Survey), based on a standardized questionnaire (stratified simple random sample, N = 600). The National Institute of Statistics and the Electoral Register provided the aggregate data per locality. Unvaried and multivariate analyses (hierarchical regression method) were conducted based on these data. Some dimensions of urbanism, identified as predictors of the political dimensions of social capital, suggest that the area under analysis has a predominantly monocentric character, where the rural-urban distinction continues to remain relevant. There are also arguments favoring the dissolution of the rural-urban distinction and the emergence of polycentric spatial structures. The presence of some influences related to the information consumption on all six indicators of the political dimensions of social capital under analysis suggests the occurrence of emerging forms of a space of flows. The identified effects of social problems associated with transport infrastructure and of migration experience on the political dimensions of social capital, also support the emergence of space of flows. We recommend that, in the urban studies in former communist countries, conceptualization of urbanism as predictor of the political dimensions of social capital should consider both the material dimensions of space, as well as the dimensions of information consumption and migration experience.

Introduction to the Phenomenological Approach to Urban, Residential, and Domestic Space