Defeating a Pandemic? There's an App for That. Tracing Formations, Enactments and Performances of New Smartphone Technologies in the Fight Against COVID-19 in Norway
Jonas Engestøl Wettre · NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives · 2020
This thesis is about how new digital technologies are formed and engaged as political governance tools and how they are used to govern populations. More specifically, it examines how new smartphone technologies have been engaged and been deployed in pandemic governance, and with what implications. To support the fight against COVID-19, national governments have moved to facilitate, adopt and promote COVID-19 smartphone apps as part of their pandemic governance strategies. One example is Norway, with its app ‘Smittestopp’ (‘Infection Stop’). This thesis applies practice-oriented document and discourse analysis alongside theoretical insights from science and technology studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT) to trace and analyse how ‘Smittestopp’ has formed, performed and been enacted as a pandemic governance tool in Norway. The objective is to demonstrate how exceptional political circumstances, like pandemics, impact, and are impacted by, the formation and deployment of the governance tools engaged to mediate them. The analysis shows that the form, technological features and public (dis)approval ‘Smittestopp’ acquires are attributable to enhanced and intensified political demands for speed, efficiency and knowledge during the pandemic. The design and public reception of ‘Smittestopp’ are also directly influenced by international big tech initiatives and European Union (EU) attempts at governing national COVID-19 smartphone apps coherently. Instituted as a data-driven digital technology of politics, ‘Smittestopp’ is utilised by the Norwegian government to responsibilise citizens for the feasibility of softened pandemic ‘lockdown’ measures. In addition, citizens are enrolled as de facto knowledge producers for pandemic governance through the app, as data donors. The analysis also shows how ‘Smittestopp’ comes to qualitatively modify and transform the Norwegian pandemic political reality into which it is introduced, as a now operational digital technology integral to that reality.