Managing citizenship in digital society. Keynote presented to the Annual Conference in i- Society.

From 2011 and forwards a new digitization strategy for public systems has been implemented in Denmark. From December 1st 2015, all interaction between social institutions and citizens in its multiple contexts is by law digital and online. The underlying logic is that Denmark is among the most digitally integrated countries around the globe, and digitization has already increasingly been adopted over the past decades by the societal systems, and by groups and individual persons. Overall, Denmark can be characterized as a digital society.
The main argument in this presentation is that citizens in their local everyday life deal very differently with the opportunities and challenges that they encounter in their efforts to manage their citizen life in relation to big and small systems. Primarily their citizen agency focus on their local, personally embedded interests and issues. 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. To achieve this, all citizens need digital literacy in order to manage their everyday citizen life.
Empirically, the paper draws on findings from an extensive study of media competences and media literacy in a Danish context, conducted in fall 2014. The qualitative findings are supported by new quantitative data on digital media use, news media and democracy in a Danish context.