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 Society is transforming due to changes in demographics, the environment, and technology, and thus faces multiple challenges. In this context, data coordination and access, collectively referred to as the digital transformation, are key to addressing anticipated societal tensions.

This interview-based qualitative study focuses on how researchers responsible for large-scale population-based research infrastructure view the opportunities and dilemmas in play in the intersection between data and personal privacy. The objective is to look beyond the glossy formulations of official strategy documents to see how the digital transformation (more specifically, data-driven research) is perceived from the active researcher’s point of view, and what the intellectual negotiation process is like. What is of interest here is how the accessibility of register data is legitimized, and what developments and significant changes are simultaneously taking place. The research questions are:

1) How does the research community acknowledge the tensions and dilemmas between the possible risks and harms of large-scale, data-driven, population-based research, and its potential benefits?

2) How are the accessibility and coordination of research data justified and discussed by the research community, given the risks and potential, in relation to political and societal goals and policies?

With the contemporary Swedish research context as a point of departure, these research questions are addressed based on policy documents about digitalization, and on interviews with researchers.

This chapter deals with the Church of Sweden’s digital communication.The focus is on how to be a church in a digital age. The chapter is primarily examining and discussing how digital communicationis perceived and discussed in terms of need, possibilities and limitations. The concrete “how” of this communication in the different online channels is not of particular interest here.

Today, the church has developed its web presence through for example websites, blogs and social media channels. The main argument for being online is the importance of being where people are. It is argued that when people (in general) tend to spend more and more time online, the church should be online too. This is in line with the idea that the Church of Sweden is a folk church. The web gives the church the possibility to be present all over the country, and beyond – and this is seen as part of its mission.

The informants describe the necessity for the church to be online, and how online communication opens up possibilities to reach new people. Simultaneously, concerns are expressed that online communication might make the idea of the folk church more difficult to maintain, because people are given the possibility of picking and choosing only certain parts of church life.

One challenge, expressed by the informants, is to organise communication work in tandem with established church structures. However, informants have seen the work of communication officers (and their likes) gradually becoming closer to, and partly integrated into, everyday work within the church structure.

Digital communication is here to stay, and consequently, the church must work out how best to harbour the possibilities of digital tools, while acknowledging and learning from the difficulties and consequences.

Recension av Sune Fahlgreen, Joel Halldorf, Erik Sidenvall & CeciliaWejryd (red.), Ostädade väckelser: Modernitetens förtrupper (Göteborg&Stockholm: Makadam förlag, 2023), 327 s. isbn 978-91-7061-450-7. Inbunden. 

This article proposes a Nordic GIS-based framework and platform for the digital registration and visualisation of places of worship and discusses how such a research infrastructure can be built to aid research on the spatial and temporal dimensions of religion in the Nordic countries, initially limited to Christian places of worship. The platform is scalable and can include other geographical areas or layers of information in the future. The data will be open for others to reuse and combine with additional datasets. The article presents the current data available from four Nordic countries and discusses methods of retrieving, vetting, and coordinating this data. The article then suggests a framework based on registering at least 13 fields of information at each place of worship and proposes a common taxonomy of religious affiliation facilitating research across borders. Combining spatial and temporal data with multi-level data on religious affiliations will open new possibilities for further research on the ebb and flow of religious movements in the Nordic countries.

This article examines how and why the Church of Sweden utilizes digital media, primarily social media and the web. The focus is on the ideas and motivations behind this use. Seven interviews were conducted with representatives from all three levels of the organization of the Church: the local, the regional and the national. The interviewees were selected to represent both those working with (digital) communication and those representing the more traditional institutional structure.

The Church of Sweden has a strong online presence, actively using their web pages and various forms of social media. When asked why they are online, the answers often center around availability (being where people are) and communicating in a language and medium people understand. The informants also refer to the idea of the Church of Sweden as a folk church (folkkyrka), accessible to everyone.

Even though there have been discussions aboutthe role of communication, including the howsand whys, and the extent to which it is possibleto integrate language and formats from PR businesses(and related fields), the different informantsagree on the need to integrate modern forms ofcommunication into traditional structures.

This article argues that one must consider the national context when interpreting the role of digital media within the Church of Sweden. The declining membership rates (often referred to as a secularization process) and Sweden's status as a highly media-penetrated country (a process referred to as mediatization) influence the church's willingness to use digital media to communicate with the public.

The contributions in this book shed light on the complexity of surveillance in a digital age and problematise power relations between the many actors involved in the development and performance of surveillance culture. More and more actors and practices play an increasing role in our contemporary digitalised society, and the chapters show how people negotiate surveillance in their use of digital media, often knowingly leaving digital footprints, and sometimes trying to avoid surveillance. The digital transformation will continue in the foreseeable future. The coordination and analysis of data is viewed by many government agencies, corporations, and other actors as important tools for improving public administration, health, and economic growth. For this development to be legitimate, it is important that hard values, such as technical and legal developments, and soft values, such as ethical and cultural values, are taken into consideration. 

Over the recent decades, the possibilities to surveil people have increased and been refined with the ongoing digital transformation of society. Surveillance can now go in any direction, and various forms of online surveillance saturate most people’s lives, which are increasingly lived in digital environments.

To understand this situation and nuance the contemporary discussions about surveillance – not least in the highly digitalised context of the Nordic countries – we must adopt cultural and ethical perspectives in studying people’s attitudes, motives, and behaviours. The “culture of surveillance”, to borrow David Lyon’s term, is a culture where questions about privacy and publicness, and rights and benefits, are once again brought to the fore.

This anthology takes up this challenge, with contributions from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical frameworks that discuss and shed light on the complexity of contemporary surveillance and thus problematise power relations between the many actors involved in the development and performance of surveillance culture. The contributions highlight how more and more actors and practices play a part in our increasingly digitalised society.

The book is an outcome of the research project "iAccept: Soft surveillance – between acceptance and resistance", financed by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation. The anthology’s editors are project members, all based at Umeå University, Sweden: Lars Samuelsson, associate professor of philosophy; Coppélie Cocq, professor of Sámi studies and digital humanities; Stefan Gelfgren, associate professor of sociology of religion; and Jesper Enbom, associate professor of media studies.

This article deals with the paradoxical relationship between thenineteenth-century Evangelical Revival and secularization. It is arguedhere that the revival and its worldview played a role in increasingpluralism and choice in the nineteenth century – a process often relatedto secularization. The Evangelical movement both attempted to op-pose modernity and rationalism and emphasized religious freedom,voluntarism, and individualism. It therefore induced and popularizedself-reflection, doubt, and deconversion. It also favoured religiousdemocracy in opposition to a state-imposed religious monopoly (atleast in northern Europe). Furthermore, by dividing people into be-lievers and nonbelievers, it emphasized religious polarization. Thiscontributed to an undermining of established religious structures,fragmenting and pluralizing the religious landscape and giving peoplethe option to abstain completely from religious commitment. TheSwedish confessional (inner mission) revivalist denomination Evan-geliska Fosterlands-Stiftelsen (EFS – approx. the Swedish Evangeli-cal Mission Society), founded in 1856, is used as a case. The popularliterature they published and distributed manifested an evangelicalworldview. In this article four themes, based on the popular literature,are used to study empirically the changing role of religion in relationto nineteenth-century revivalism: ‘the dualistic worldview’; ‘conver-sion’; ‘activism’; and ‘self-reflection’.