”Det handlar inte om att svara på frågan, vi försöker att lära folk på riktigt” : Svenska folkbiblioteks arbete med digital inkludering

The purpose of this study is to investigate how public libraries in Sweden work to increase the digital participation among the public. The study aims to gain clarity on how this work can be understood in relation to the democratic foundation on which Sweden’s public libraries rest and contribute to a better understanding of how this can be related to the imbalance in power that the information gap creates. In order to examine this, seven librarians from different Swedish municipalities have been interviewed. The chosen municipalities are of various sizes and localized in different parts of Sweden. The interviews were semistructured and were conducted via the digital meeting platform Zoom. The material from the interviews were later analysed using a thematic analysis and in relation to the theoretical framework of the study. Said theoretical framework consists of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Elfreda Chatmans theory regarding information poverty. The study shows that while librarians use some of the methods of the pedagogy of the oppressed, such as problematizing the digital exclusion, the pedagogy as a whole is not widely used. The results also show that librarians in Swedish public libraries strive to create an environment where digitally excluded individuals perceive the risk of seeking information as smaller than the potential benefit. Overall, the imbalance in power between those that are digitally included and those that are not is acknowledged, but not explicitly addressed in the work with digital inclusion.