ECREA16-Abstract

Thursday, November 10

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multiple, digital communication devices and have long experience with digital media andmedia content from their private sphere as well as from their work

or education. Denmark can therefore be characterized as a digital society. The following quotes from the media literacy study illustrate two different situa‑

tions and experiences with digitization of citizen life: “Before .. You would receive letters from the municipalities, you would receive a letter that you could

open, and then you could have it in front of you. Now you have to be active and go in and check: anything incoming? And it can be weeks between where

you do not go in and check.”(Male, 57 years)“It’s unheard of and not at all sustainable. And NemID, you cannot base everything like bank account, personal

data, everything you have, the whole family, the house, loans, all sorts of information, on a key card which, if it is lost, can be misused…everywhere. It is

so easy to find that person’s information.”(Male, 21 years) The main argument in the paper is that citizens generally in their local everyday life use digital

media just enough to manage their citizen life in relation to big and small systems. Their civic agency focus on their local, personally embedded interests

and issues (Bakardjieva 2009; Uldam &Vestergaard 2015). On the one hand, they need to be and become active, participating citizens, facilitated by digital

services and systems, in order to be included and recognized active members of society (Coleman & Blumler 2009 Coleman 2015; Dahlgren 2009, 2011,

2013). They also need to connect to their community in order to achieve the experience of meaningfulness and potentially influence (Bennet & Segerberg

2012).This, on the other hand, to some degree collides with a prominent wish to exploit the potentials of the same digital opportunities in order live a quiet,

peaceful, local life where the local meaningfulness is not overly disrupted or challenged by larger, potentially global problems and required participation.