Article In:
Language and Dialogue: Online-First Articles

Transparent communication in public transit

A cross-generic comparison of dialogic features of Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s website and Instagram

 | University of Bergamo
The growing need for sustainable lifestyle practices, both individual and collective, has sparked ongoing debates on environmental and social sustainability. Public transit plays a key role in these discussions, for its capability to meet both (Mattioli 2016; Miller et al. 2016). Recently, public bodies have successfully used participatory web tools, such as social media and websites, to promote services and engage users. This approach has fostered increased trust and improved perceptions of transparency by making information more accessible (Criado et al. 2013; Song and Lee 2016). Dialogic features in texts, pointing to interaction between writer and audience (Bondi 2022), can create the impression of transparent communication, thereby showcasing willingness to build an open dialogue. Therefore, this study analyzes dialogic features on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) website and Instagram, revealing how both platforms distinctively resort to dialogicity to enhance communicative transparency and align with the audience’s expectations.
Keywords: public transit, participatory web, dialogicity, transparent communication
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Public transit and the path to sustainability
  • 2.Public bodies on the participatory web: A strategy for transparency
  • 3.Understanding dialogicity in online written communication
  • 4.Material and methods
    • 4.1Overview of the MTA_IG and the MTA_Web corpora
    • 4.2Methods and analytical procedure
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Community and user reference
    • 5.2Other user engagement features
    • 5.3Dialogicity in relation to transparent communication strategies in MTA
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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