Are we pushing groups of citizens out of the welfare system?

The then Prime Minister Lars Løkke said in September 2011 that the goal of communication between citizens and the municipality and state in the future must be digital by 2014. The argument he puts forward is that a large proportion of the population around 95% is on the Internet. The argument does not hold, just because people are on the Internet or have access to the Internet is not the same as those citizens can find out how to use the ICT tools that are made available. Also a large part of the responsibility to understanding administrative service system is being moved to the citizens themselves and in this citizens are becoming their own "social workers".

The political system communicates via the public media; requirements, goals and offers technologies for information, communication and self-service, but to support this strategy no education to support the ICT-tools are offered. We as citizens can take IT courses at the library, but are this enough help to help us as citizens to achieve the goal?

A large proportion of citizens who are early-adaptors of the new technologies may even acquire the skills by teach themselves these, but there is also a large middle group of users that will have to acquire additional skills in order for the digitalisation of the communication to be successful. In addition, I ask in this post:

"What do we do with those groups of citizens who can not or have the skills to self-serve?"

The groups I am thinking of are:

• Disabled persons who for physical reasons can not communicate with the public

• The mentally ill who do not have the psychic profit or skills to take responsibility for themselves

• Newcomers to the Danish society, which have not yet acquired the language skills to speak and write Danish and nor are socialized through education or other communities to understand the Danish welfare system or the linguistic categories we use.

• International workers are missing information in English

• Citizens who lack IT skills to communicate digitally, for example the group of elderly who are not on-line, for example because they say: "it is they become too old to grasp," or who prefer the personal face-to-face communication.

• Citizens who lack the linguistic skills to understand concepts such as "What does "individual income "(in a form) mean and how do I find out what my individual income?"

• Citizens who have no understanding of what their responsibilities are as citizens in relation to the communication and the legislative.