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The knowledge society sees knowledge as the solution to global, national and personal problems, often without differentiating knowledge. With access to the internet we have access to the largest knowledge database in the world, but do elderly people use it? The focus of this paper is to evaluate whether elderly Danes with chronic diseases use the internet to seek knowledge on health information. The study was conducted among 2 000 Danes over 60 years of age as a cross-sectional survey using a postal questionnaire. The theoretical foundation of the study was a constructivistic evaluation of the problem domain followed by a quantitive evaluation. The results showed that elderly people with chronic diseases do not use the internet as a source of health information any differently from elderly people without chronic diseases. Thus, chronic diseases were not found to be a motivational factor or determinant for using the internet as a tool to increase personal knowledge of general health information. Furthermore, it showed that elderly people who reported that they were in good general health were more often users than elderly with a suboptimal general health.

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