The Digital Outcasts - Advanced Margins in Digital Societies

This work-in-progress paper reports on preliminary findings from 15 interviews with so called “non-digital” Danish citizens to address and problematize this classification as a social category. In linking classification theory (the categories used in the digital post system) to a notion of advanced digital marginalization (to portray the path dependency of those who struggle to maintain links to societal membership) the paper expose the complexity of the “non-digital” and discusses how the assembling and connection of certain people, as a starting point for governmental strategies, might distort and prevent insights into how individuals and social groups are (re)-produced into new socio-technical configurations. The paper presents preliminary findings that suggest that “non-digitals” are in fact digital users but not in a way that allows them to be categorised as such. Finally the paper outline how further work will use the concept of advanced digital marginalization, to elaborate on these findings.