Rooted in critical discourse studies, this paper investigates how Swedish digital welfare interfaces, both through their discourse and affordances, address older citizens. The paper is specifically interested in how this type of communication, directly or indirectly, interacts with ageist stereotypes about technology and neoliberal conceptions of the digital citizen. Although a heterogenous group in relation to technological and social resources, older adults are many times conceived as digitally vulnerable. Research has shown that a high age complicates the use of digital technology, while studies have also shown the existence of ageism in the design of digital technology and in the tech industry, which serves to reinforce stereotypes of older adults as digitally incompetent. However, the digitalization of societies and neoliberal policies seeking to make the state more efficient require older adults to be digitally active. There is therefore a disharmony between ageist stereotypes about older adults in relation to technology, and the expectations of the neoliberal state. The paper discusses how the promotion of responsibilization—thus the movement of responsibility from the state to the citizen—through the interfaces serves a dual ideological role. On the one hand, strategies of responsibilization serve to construct older adults as digitally literate and active. In this sense, responsibilization may serve to challenge ageist stereotypes. On the other hand, however, responsibilization also serves to reinforce neoliberal subject-positions, which puts a burden on the oldest citizens, and could in turn have negative impacts on the quality of life of this group.

This article aims to clarify how public digital user interfaces discursively enable and constrain interaction between citizens and the welfare state, both digitally and offline, and the potential implications of these interfaces and interactions for older citizens. An analysis of four digital welfare user interfaces in Sweden shows that information gathering is at the core and that their multimodal nature and personal language usage can foster a welcoming environment for citizens. Additionally, the study suggests that the design of these interfaces shapes the structuring of citizenship, as they not only demand specific actions from citizens to access the right information but also require knowledge about what to look for. Consequently, citizens bear the burden of work and responsibility, potentially contributing to the low use of online public services among older people and serving the renegotiation of welfare provision altogether. One way to mitigate this rigid structuring of citizenship is to offer offline interaction, a notion that is discursively promoted in some interfaces but pushed back in others. User interfaces that enable offline interaction may be beneficial for digitally vulnerable social groups, such as the older ones among citizens over age 65. However, those interfaces that are predominantly rooted in a digital-only approach risk excluding such groups.

In 2016, a report commissioned by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency found that tyre wear from road traffic and granules from artificial turf pitches were the two biggest microplastic sources in Swedish aquatic environments. Although the report’s figures were surrounded by uncertainty, they became artillery in a public debate that followed about microplastics and the environmental hazards tied to artificial turf pitches. Against this backdrop, this chapter aims to understand the use of scientification, here understood as a discursive strategy that attributes scientific nature to an issue, in the news media coverage of microplastics and artificial turf pitches. This chapter discusses the role of scientification in the discursive struggle over environmental risks, a strategy that, as shown, could be used to attach either certainty or uncertainty to an issue, as well as to create fallacious argumentation. This chapter points to the need that the media guards the discursive use of science when reporting on environmental risks, in order not to relativise or water down the authority of science in public discourse.

In Sweden, the principle of “Digital First”, as proposed by the Agency for Digital Government, stipulates that contacts between citizens and public agencies ought to take place primarily via digital means. Following this principle, welfare provision has increasingly become an online practice, which does not only change the forms of welfare provision, but also, and significantly, demand specific resources and skills from the citizens. This development is important to highlight in relation to senior citizens (aged 65+), as research has made it clear how this is a heterogenic but also digitally vulnerable group. In a highly digitalized country as Sweden, about 10 percent of this group lack access of technical devices for using the internet and 15 percent state that they never use the Internet at all (Olsson & Viscovi, 2023). This paper focuses on Swedish digital user interfaces, with an aim of understanding how their semiotic composition in different ways demands responsibility of senior citizens. Theoretically, it centers on the concept of responsibilization (Koksvik, 2020) and on critical discussions on digital citizenship (Schou & Hjelholt, 2018). Empirically, the paper draws on a multimodal discourse analysis of Swedish digital welfare user interfaces, which explores how the interfaces, in their layout, use of different semiosis, language use and affordances, multimodally serve to shift responsibility from the welfare state to the citizen. The paper critically discusses the implication of this shift for senior citizens, as a digitally vulnerable group.

This study aims to contribute knowledge about how an environmental issue is discursively forged notwithstanding the prevalence of significant scientific uncertainty. This is done by studying the production of news about artificial turf as a microplastic pollutant in Sweden. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 journalists and editors, public officials, politicians, industry representatives and experts, all involved in the issue of artificial turf. The study shows how media logic, among other factors, informs the interpretations of the uncertainties surrounding artificial turf as an environmental problem and concludes that the power of media logic needs to be considered also in the construction of other scientifically charged issues.

As one of the leading countries when it comes to the access and use of ICTs (OECD, 2018), Sweden has also been on the forefront of the digitalization of government services. The Agency for Digital government, has launched the principal of Digital First, which means that digital encounters should, when relevant, be prioritized in the interaction between government agencies and citizens (Agency for digital government, 2023). At the same time, research has shown a divide in the diffusion and use of ICTs in Sweden, where increased age plays a negative role for access and literacy (Olsson et al, 2019). Against this backdrop, it is therefore important that the praxis of Digital First, thus the increased digitalization of the encounter between government and citizen, is inclusive also for the less digital savvy citizens, as some groups of elderly. This, in order for digitalization to enable rather than restrict citizenship.

The current study, which is part of a larger project on senior citizens’ encounter with the digital welfare system in Sweden, analyzes the affordances and constrains of government user interfaces. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, the study focuses on how government agencies, through the semiotic elements of their online user interfaces, offer and limit engagement and interaction with citizens–both digitally and off-screen. Moreover, the analysis has the overall ambition to discern the explicit and latent characteristics that the user interfaces require the users to have. The user interfaces studied belong to the Swedish pensions agency, 1177 (the Swedish healthcare system’s official website), The municipality of Växjö, and the municipality of Älmhult.

The study discusses the affordances and constraint of the user interfaces in relation to digital citizenship (Schou & Hjelholt, 2018), a figure that is discursively construed by policy and the user interfaces themselves, but that is also materialized by the new forms of governance in advanced capitalist societies, where the slimming of government passes tasks to the citizen. The study argues that the naturalization of digital citizenship risks making senior citizens, an already vulnerable group, even more vulnerable, as the user interfaces require a certain level of digital literacy. Therefore, light needs to be shed on how user interfaces meet the needs of different groups of citizens, which in turn requires more empirical research on the actual encounters between citizens and government user interfaces.

Aim: This study examines the discursive construction of medical cannabis in Swedish newspapers, with the aim of understanding how the news media recontextualise the medical potential of cannabis.

Design: The study is centred on the concept of recontextualisation, which focuses on how discourses are reinterpreted and reshaped when moving from one context to another, with a special focus on recontextualisation in relation to the media. Methodologically, the study uses critical discourse analysis to qualitatively analyse 134 articles of different subgenres, published in four Swedish newspapers between 2015 and 2020.

Results: The study shows that medical cannabis is constructed around myriad topics and contexts, ranging from news that focuses on the medical potential of cannabis to articles where medical cannabis is mentioned in passing and constructed in a more abstract form. The media have difficulties retaining a conceptual boundary between medical and recreational cannabis. Moreover, the study shows that the medical potential of cannabis is discursively constructed using three different discourses: patient discourse, strong science discourse, and weak science discourse.

Conclusions: The study suggests that there is a widening of the debate on cannabis in the Swedish public sphere, giving more recognition to the potential medical use of cannabis. The media, however, show difficulties in refining discourses on medical cannabis, which results in an altering between constructions that are strongly connected to science, and those that are not.

This article addresses how class as a category of conflict and struggle is understood and shaped discursively in mainstream media today. We utilise a case study of how Swedish news media represents the long-lasting conflict in the Swedish labour market between the Swedish Dockworkers’ Union and the employer organisation, Sweden's Ports. Using critical discourse analysis, we show two ways in which class relations are recontextualised in three Swedish newspapers. One is through obscuring class and centring the conflict around business and nationalist discourses, which in the end legitimise a corporate perspective. The other, more marginalised, way is through the critique of class relations that appears in subjective discourse types. This handling of class, we argue, serves the reproduction of a post-political condition.

This study examines the construction of media literacy in a special issue on source criticism of the Swedish children's comic Bamse – Världens Starkaste Björn [Bamse – The World's Strongest Bear]. This is done with the purpose of understanding what values, perspectives, and practices are promoted when media literacy is communicated via children's edutainment media. Using narrative and discourse analysis, we problematise how notions of truth (such as post-truth) guide much of the discourse on digital media in today's post-political society, and how that and individualisation shape notions of media literacy. This is visible in the analysed case in how source criticism is constructed in relation to notions of truth and falsehood, and as moral lessons aimed at the individual media user. We argue that such an individualised, decontextualised, and depoliticised take on media literacy is problematic and an expression of neoliberalism and a middle-class gaze.