How is digitalization of the offshore oil industry fundamentally
changing how we understand work and ways of knowing?
Digitalization sits at the forefront of public and academic conversation
today, calling into question how we work and how we know. In Digital
Oil, Eric Monteiro uses the Norwegian offshore oil and gas industry as
a lens to investigate the effects of digitalization on embodied labor,
and in doing so shows how our use of new digital technology transforms
work and knowing.
For years, roughnecks have performed the dangerous and unwieldy work of
extracting the oil that lies three miles below the seabed along the
Norwegian Continental Shelf. Today, the Norwegian oil industry is
largely digital, operated by sensors and driven by data. Digital
representations of physical processes inform work practices and
decision-making with remotely operated, unmanned deep-sea facilities.
Drawing on two decades of in-depth interviews, observations, news clips,
and studies of this industry, Eric Monteiro dismantles the divide
between the virtual and the physical in Digital Oil.
What is gained or lost when objects and processes become algorithmic
phenomena with the digital inferred from the physical? How can
data-driven work practices and operational decision-making approximate
qualitative interpretation, professional judgement, and evaluation? How
are emergent digital platforms and infrastructures, as machineries of
knowing, enabling digitalization? In answering these questions Monteiro
offers a novel analysis of digitalization as an effort to press the
limits of quantification of the qualitative.
