Andreas Nord

What are analog bulletin boards used for today? : Analysing media uses, intermediality and technology affordances in Swedish bulletin board messages using a citizen science approach

Analog bulletin boards are omnipresent in Swedish urban areas, yet little systematic knowledge about this communication medium exists. In the shadow of the rapid emergence of digital media the analog bulletin board has received less attention than its digital successors, many of them having incorporated similar functionality with novel technical solutions. In this study we used a citizen science method to collect 1167 messages from bulletin boards around Sweden aided by school children and teachers, with the purpose of shedding new light on what is communicated on the boards, by whom, using what types of technologies and in what way the messages refer to other media. Results show that the most common messages are invitations to events, such as concerts, lectures and sports events, followed by buy-and-sell ads for goods and services. The most frequent sender is an association, for example NGOs, sports associations or religious communities. Almost half of the sampled messages were professionally printed, about forty per cent were made by home printers. Only six per cent of the messages were handwritten, almost exclusively by private persons as senders. Moreover, we show how the analog bulletin board has adapted to recent changes in media technology—a media landscape which is saturated with electronic- and mobile media. Further, the bulletin board still holds a firm place in a media ecology where local communication is in demand, and exists in parallel with electronic media. Close to forty percent of the messages contained hyperlinks to web pages and we found (and removed for anonymization purposes) more than six hundred phone numbers from the dataset.

Klarspråk i nätinteraktion Trevlighet, trafikordningsplaner och undringar om döda rådjur i ett kommunalt e-serviceforum

I det svenska klarspraksarbetet har rad och riktlinjer for spraket hittills varit anpassade for olika typer av traditionellt skriftsprakliga och monologiska texter, sasom informationstexter och beslutsbrev. Den nya typ av skriftlig kommunikation i olika digitala forum som borjar bli vanlig staller krav pa nya typer av rad och rekommendationer. For att veta mer om vilka rad och rekommendationer som ska utformas behover vi dock veta mer om vad som faktiskt forsiggar i sadana forum, och vilka kommunikationsproblem som kan uppsta. Artikeln bygger pa en undersokning av interaktionen i ett internetforum pa en svensk kommuns hemsida. Analysen visar att kommunikationen kannetecknas av en stark betoning av den relationella funktionen fran kommunforetradarnas sida, och denna ”trevlighet” fungerar av allt att doma val. En utmaning verkar dock vara konflikten mellan vardagsvarld – har och nu – och regelstyrd myndighetsvarld, men analysen visar ocksa att det inte nodvandigtvis ar sa enkelt att enskilda endast vill veta vad som galler ”har och nu”. Summary In the ‘Plain Swedish’ effort, advice and guidelines have mostly focused on traditional written and monologic texts. This paper presents some results from a survey of the interactions between government employees and citizens in a Swedish municipality’s online forum, where citizens are invited to ask questions and seek advice. The findings represent a first step towards developing advice for written communication in the digital forums that are used by authorities to provide citizen services. The analysis shows that communication in the forums was characterised by a strong emphasis on the relational function or, in other words, on the relationship between the communicators manning the forum and the citizens. Seemingly, a focus on ‘niceness’ enabled the interactions to run relatively smoothly. One challenge, however, arose from the conflict between citizens’ life-world perspective and the rule-controlled government world. Citizens wish to find practical solutions to their problems in the here and now, and conflicts may occur when a specific question or request is simply answered by quoting the relevant regulation. The analysis, however, also shows that citizens were, in some cases, interested in knowing the underlying rules and regulations. This paper concludes by discussing the actual advantages of online forums for government-citizen interactions where repair in communications is possible.