Paper short abstract:

Through the analysis of expert inquiries from the 1970s, this research aims to understand how data infrastructures became an object of governance in Norway. By showing the issue-making of the digital before digitalisation, iit highlights a discursive inertia in policy formulations of digitalisation.

Paper long abstract:

Governance practices and digitalisation must be understood as interwoven. While there is much attention to the current digitalisation of public administrations, my work addresses the historical becoming of an overarching and trans-sectoral data policy in Norway. Drawing on STS literature, I seek to fill a gap in existing research by bringing together the bureaucratic rationality, its expectations of computer technologies and its material properties in a material-semiotic analysis. The aim of is to better understand how computers and data infrastructures became an object of governance for the Norwegian State and the issue-making taking place before the widespread digitalisation of society. This will be done by studying expert documents from the 1970s, mandated by the Government to examine how the State could make use of computer technologies to accomplish political targets. These expert documents are central to the Norwegian, and Nordic, history of so-called knowledge-based politics, and significantly contribute to the process of policy formulation. Written by a committee of appointed issue-experts from public administration and technical research institutes, the documents give valuable insight into the desires and expectations of societal development and the role digital technology was imagined playing in it. Digitalisation is a field draped in novelty, but investigating the history uncovers a discursive inertia and highlights persistent challenges. Critical remarks on coordination, user engagement and agile systems are but some of the issues found in these older documents that keeps resurfacing. Recognising this persistency contribute to formulate questions attuned to the incremental processes of technological- and societal development.