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Digital Oil: Machineries of Knowing
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.
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.
216 pages, Paperback
Published November 8, 2022
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About the author
Eric Monteiro
11 books1 followerA robotics engineer by training, an analytics executive by profession, and a writer by accident, Eric Monteiro is ultimately a full-time student of the human mind. Born and raised in Brazil, he immigrated to Canada in 2003. While most of his career has been in business working with McKinsey & Company and other corporations, Eric has always had a passion for quantum physics and science fiction – Alma blends these two passions in one project.
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