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.