Dagens amerikabrev : Det är precis som på TV

Sammanfattning: This master thesis is looking into the stories on the internet forum www.resedagboken.se. The stories of Swedish teenaged exchange students in the U.S. are studied and the main purpose is to see both what they are writing about and the reason for why they are spending their time writing down their experiences in a public forum. Even though most of the teenagers here are writing with a specific audience in mind, all the stories are free to anyone to take part of and this causes a difficult position for the teenagers who often seem to forget the public point of view when they are telling about their personal lives. The study is divided into two parts. The first one looks into the content of the stories and the other one focuses on the storytellers and their reasons for writing. The teenagers are writing both a lot about their everyday lives in their new environment, but also a lot of things to keep in touch with what their friends and family in Sweden are doing. To get their readers to understand and connect more with them over the stories, most of them use references to movies and TV-shows to help the readers visualize the writers’ experience. As the teenagers are experiencing this year on their own and are spending a year abroad without the usual supporting by family and friends, my results are pointing to that they are using these stories to get the support they need. Not only are they using the support from the past to deal with the present, they also use these stories so they will keep their place amongst their friends in Sweden. They use stories to prepare both themselves and their family and friends for their return.