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

TL;DR

This paper explores how Danish seniors navigate public digitalization through community-based digital support, emphasizing the role of distributed agency in healthcare interactions.

Contribution

The study introduces the concept of distributed agency in digital public services, linking it to medical humanities and digital literacy.

Findings

Senior citizens rely on community-led digital support to manage public digital platforms.

Digital agency is shaped by distributed socio-material relations involving humans and technology.

Public digitalization demands a rethinking of accessibility and responsiveness in healthcare.

Abstract

Communication and interaction with public authorities and healthcare professionals in Denmark primarily go through digital self-service platforms, requiring diverse skills and device access. In this article, we describe how senior citizens in Denmark handle and make sense of public digitalization through different forms of digital support. Through an ethnographic study of community-led initiatives of digital support, we highlight how senior citizens find socio-technical ways of managing digital obligations and argue that citizens’ digital agency in day-to-day interactions with public digitalization relies heavily on distributed socio-material relations. We suggest that the ways of engaging with healthcare through digital means should be of increasing concern to medical humanities scholars, as digital literacies and technologies have become gatekeepers to welfare and healthcare. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s reconceptualization of responsibility as response-ability, and Jane Bennett’s notion of distributed agency, we argue that the ability of digital citizens to respond is a result of a distributed and combined responsiveness of human, technological, and digital actants. We point to two opposite but interrelated assemblages: public digital as distributed intervening mediated through computers, smartphones, tablets, public digital mail platforms, et cetera, and digital support as distributed response, which serves to mitigate and translate demands and obligations of the digitalized welfare state. Consequently, as digital developments tend to generate an increasingly individualizing gaze, medical humanities must be critically concerned with the manifold, subtle actants that co-constitute accessibility and responsiveness of patients and citizens.