Steuerung der Informationsgesellschaft? Digitale Ordnungspolitik in zeithistorischer Perspektive

Digitalization has caused disruptive structural changes in the last decades that can be understood as a digital transformation. How to regulate and shape this digital change, and to cope with the effects of this seemingly unstoppable process, has been the subject of political debates and policies in Germany and across Europe since the 1960s. West German digital policy and digital regulation, as this article argues, oscillated over time: during the 1960s and early 1970s, overinflated technocratic conceptions of research and technology policy were dominated by engineering expertise and computer-based political planning ideas, whereas in the late 1970s, these conceptions gave way to angst-ridden debates on a looming computerized surveillance state – fueled not least by the new social movements. Discussions on the ramifications of computerization for the labor market that were controversial in the 1980s came in the following decade to trigger policies that veered towards technological determinism. Here, computer-oriented education, job training in digital skills, and developing a flexible workforce adapted to digitalization were seen as key to Germany‘s competitive strength in a globalizing world. From a historical perspective, these different conceptions of and policies relating to digitalization point to the importance of developing a more value-based and long-term policy approach to managing and shaping digital change.