Network Euphoria, Super-Information Systems and the West German Plan for a National Database System.
Much attention has been devoted to planning as the key concept in political discourse of the Federal Republic from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Much less attention has been paid to the closely related notion of information. At the turn of the 1970s, one of the most important initiatives of the We...
| Publicado en: | German History Vol. 38; no. 2; pp. 311 - 338 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Oxford University Press / USA
Jun2020
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=143550077&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 143550077 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 02663554 31M jtl: German History issn: 02663554 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Jun2020 vid: 38 iid: 2 pid: 622 pub: Oxford University Press / USA artinfo: ui: 143550077 10.1093/gerhis/ghaa011 ppf: 311 ppct: 27 formats: fmt: @attributes: type: P size: 216KB tig: atl: Network Euphoria, Super-Information Systems and the West German Plan for a National Database System. aug: au: Frohman, Larry su: Federated database systems Information storage & retrieval systems Documentation standards Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Political party : Germany) Jochimsen, Reimut Social planning Germany (West) sug: subj: Germany (West) Federated database systems Information storage & retrieval systems Documentation standards Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Political party : Germany) Jochimsen, Reimut Social planning ab: Much attention has been devoted to planning as the key concept in political discourse of the Federal Republic from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Much less attention has been paid to the closely related notion of information. At the turn of the 1970s, one of the most important initiatives of the West German government in the informational domain was a proposed national database network. The conception of politics that underlay this project bundled the utopian aspirations associated with the use of computers to integrate and analyse information with the conviction that more, better and different kinds of information would make complex, industrial societies like the Federal Republic more governable. The West German database network embodied two complementary modernist visions: the dream of total data integration and the antithetical but equally seductive documentarian belief that the problems of information management could be solved by reducing the symbolic field within which information was always embedded to stable, elemental units of meaning. However, the plan for a national database network collapsed before it could even fully make it onto the drawing board. This article argues that the project failed not because of privacy concerns, but because these modernist visions quickly ran up against limits that were as much political and conceptual as technological. In the end all that was left was a documentation system for the federal government in which the connections to social planning, which had provided much of the original impetus for the system, had all but disappeared. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: © 2019 German History Society. item: German History holder: Oxford University Press / USA dt: @attributes: year: 2020 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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