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Article published In: Dialogicity in Framing Environmental Discourse
Edited by Marina Bondi and Judith Turnbull
[Language and Dialogue 15:1] 2025
► pp. 81–104

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Transparent communication in public transit

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

 | University of Bergamo
Published online: 10 January 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00188.fal
Abstract
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, Giulio. 2016. “Transport needs in a climate-constrained world. A novel framework to reconcile social and environmental sustainability in transport.” Energy Research and Social Science 181: 118–128. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Miller, Patrick, Alexander de Barros, Lina G. Kattan, and S. C. Wirasinghe. 2016. “Public transportation and sustainability: A review.” KSCE Journal of Civil Engineering 20(3): 1076–1083. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). 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, J. Ignacio, Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan, and J. Ramon Gil-Garcia. 2013. “Government innovation through social media.” Government information quarterly 30(4): 319–326. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Song, Changsoo, and Jooho Lee. 2016. “Citizens’ use of social media in government, perceived transparency, and trust in government.” Public Performance and Management Review 39(2): 430–453. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Dialogic features in texts, pointing to interaction between writer and audience (. 2022. “Dialogicity in individual and institutional scientific blogs.” Publications 10(1): 9. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), 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. (n.d.). About. [URL] website and Instagram, revealing how both platforms distinctively resort to dialogicity to enhance communicative transparency and align with the audience’s expectations.
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
References (51)
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