Distributed Response to Distributed Intervening: Making Sense of Public Digitalization Through Digital Support

Area of Science:

• Digital Health
• Medical Humanities
• Sociology of Technology

Background:

• Public services and healthcare in Denmark are increasingly digitalized, requiring citizens to possess specific digital literacies and device access.
• Senior citizens face challenges in navigating these digital self-service platforms, impacting their access to essential services.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore how senior citizens in Denmark manage and understand public digitalization.
• To investigate the role of community-led digital support initiatives.
• To analyze the concept of digital agency among senior citizens in the context of public digitalization.

Main Methods:

• Ethnographic study of community-led digital support initiatives.
• Analysis of socio-technical interactions and distributed agency.
• Theoretical framework drawing on Donna Haraway and Jane Bennett.

Main Results:

• Senior citizens develop socio-technical strategies to manage digital obligations.
• Digital agency is heavily reliant on distributed socio-material relations.
• Two key assemblages identified: public digital interventions and distributed digital support responses.

Conclusions:

• Digital literacies and technologies act as gatekeepers to welfare and healthcare, necessitating critical attention from medical humanities.
• The responsiveness of digital citizens is a collective effort involving human, technological, and digital actants.
• Medical humanities should focus on the subtle actants co-constituting patient and citizen accessibility and responsiveness in an increasingly digitalized world.