In recent decades, numerous security technologies have emerged with the aim of fostering secure communities and providing people with the tools to bolster their everyday safety. Focusing specifically on security apps, this article explores how apps addressing security in public and semi-public spaces constitute preconditions for everyday user engagement, and vice versa, how users actively respond to these preconditions. Through identifying the (dis)affordances involved in such processes, we investigate co-production of user engagement with security apps. Drawing on observations and interviews with producers and users of apps, we explore the landscape of security apps as pervaded by processes of intended and actual (dis)affordances, sometimes also leading to abandonment of both use and users. A key finding is the divergence between the intended purposes of these apps – often framed around broad security ambitions – and their actual use, which frequently intertwines with mundane routines and logistical needs. This divergence paradoxically legitimizes broader securitisation discourses, even as the apps’ “successful use” often reflects a relatively privileged everyday life distant from tangible threats, highlighting the complex interplay between market forces, user practices, and the normalisation of surveillance.

Katarina Winter och Anne Kaun utvecklar i den här artikeln begreppet ”digitala trygghetsteknologier” för att beskriva nya digitala initiativ för att öka tryggheten i våra offentliga rum. Med avstamp i forskning om säkerhetisering och i teknik- och vetenskapsstudier (STS) visar de att även till synes ”mjuka” teknologier, som ofta presenteras som mindre ingripande och mer legitima, riskerar att normalisera och förstärka en logik där trygghet görs till en fråga om övervakning, kartläggning och kontroll. Den begreppsliga diskussionen illustreras empiriskt med material från tre fallstudier av olika typer av fenomen som faller under deras begrepp. Genom att introducera och problematisera begreppet digitala trygghetsteknologier vill Winter och Kaun möjliggöra analyser av teknologiers diskursiva, materiella och politiska implikationer för hur trygghet produceras, för vilka subjekt som målas upp som hot eller skyddsvärda, samt för hur ansvar förskjuts mellan offentliga och privata aktörer.

This article examines the intersection of three key developments in global north societies: the growing emphasis on (in)security and fear of crime, the expansion and pluralization of policing, and the increasing digitalization of crime policy arenas. Focusing on the implementation of “System X”, a leading Swedish crime prevention technology, this study explores how these trends manifest in daily municipal work. Employing the concepts of articulation work and sociotechnical imaginaries, the analysis reveals how expectations of System X are socialized and materialized in practice.Findings demonstrate that public officials legitimize System X by contrasting its promise of future evidence-based crime prevention with a rejected “unsystematic past”. Their daily often extremely time-consuming work, navigating both practical challenges and expectations of new technological solutions, reinforces their commitment through discursive and material vouching for System X. This implementation process involves a dialectic of anticipation and everyday challenges, with broader securitization discourses driving fear of crime, simultaneously capitalizing on techno-optimism. Challenges in this way constitute a presupposition for the work in that they legitimize the relevance of imagining the systematic future.As a sociotechnical imaginary, security technologies like System X intersects with larger worldmaking and wider trends in plural policing and security markets. The implementation requires the public officials to exist in the past, present and future simultaneously, transforming imagined goals into meaningful present-day practices. This dynamic underscores the need for critical analyses of how optimism-driven technology co-exist with, and potentially obscures the complex realities it aims to address.

Varför påstår människor saker om hur tillståndet i samhället är och borde vara? Mot vilken bakgrund görs anspråk på att veta vilken väg som är den rätta? I Den svenska berusningspolitken under­söker författarna detta genom att gräva djupt i över hundra års historia. Vi får följa ­utvecklingen från förbuds­omröstningar, forskning, styrning, experimen­tell ­narkotikaförskrivning till nu­tidens debatter om Systembolagets framtid. Dessa exempel belyser hur Sveriges restriktiva syn på berusningsmedel har varit allt annat än enhetlig. Innovativa lösningar har prövats och berusnings­problemet har betraktats på olika sätt beroende på substans och tidens normer. Boken visar att kunskap oavsett om den är erövrad, påstådd eller erfaren ofta gynnar dem som har en agenda för sitt agerande, vilket synliggör att kunskapsbaserad ­politik ofta består av politikbaserad ­kunskap. Det här är en bok som manar till eftertanke om hur vi hanterar kunskap om berusning och samhälle.

BackgroundIn 2018, the planned opening of a second Needle and Syringe Exchange Program (NSP) unit in Stockholm, Sweden, was stopped with reference to protests from the public. Local Stockholm media cited stakeholders who claimed that the initiative was led by politicians with “zero knowledge about what makes citizens upset” and referred to reported public concern over a preschool located near the planned NSP unit. This case highlights the significant role of the public – and the idea of public opinion – in relation to political and medial aspects of alcohol and other drug (AOD) issues. Our aim is to scrutinize how “the public” is produced in local print media reports on harm reduction measures such as the NSP, to illuminate how these representations operate and what reality/ies they co-produce.MethodsWe analyzed 171 articles reporting on harm reduction in local Stockholm print media from 2012 to 2023. The themes identified in the analysis emerged from a combination of data-driven empirical observations and a theory-driven approach grounded in the influential literature on publics and counterpublics by Michael Warner and Nancy Fraser.ResultsThe overarching articulation in the material is that of a singular and homogeneous public. Public opinion regarding local experiences of individual drug use and harm reduction is depicted as being driven by fear and worry over living alongside “messy others”, thereby producing a public of worried local community witnesses. This production of the public takes on two different meanings depending on the narrative of the articles: 1) as righteous and entitled, 2) as ignorant and irrational. As a result, the public comes to operate as either a consulted public deserving consideration in the implementation of harm reduction policies or as an uneducated political obstacle to change. Consequently, the public is assigned both a counterpublic and a dominant public identity.ConclusionsWhen the representation of the worried public is repeatedly echoed by the media, it becomes hard to ignore in policy-making processes. The implications of such media representations are significant, as they risk disguising the complex nature of publics as a diverse group of individuals while reproducing taken-for-granted ideas about local communities opposing harm reduction measures. In addition, the appropriation of a counterpublic identity narrows the discursive space for action. Taken together, the repetition of a singular worried public and the appropriation of the counterpublic position make it nearly impossible to imagine alternative public responses to harm reduction. As a consequence, this can limit well-needed policy responses to AOD issues.