Digitalization of Society and Socio-political Issues 1

14The Digitalization of Cultural Policies in France

With the spread of the “technological revolution” in society, digital technology is an increasingly important part of public intervention. Economic, education, health and security policies have gradually integrated the digital dimension of social issues, while public officials have sought to build new “instruments” (Hood 2006) to act in the “information society”. However, the emergence of digital policies should not be considered univocally, as a simple adaptation of governments to the new technological environment: State intervention in turn contributes to building categories of understanding to think about the social world (Bourdieu 2012), in particular the “digital” category, as a set of causes to defend, as a sector of activity to support and regulate, or as a particular mode of action.

The emergence of new categories of intervention refers to a now classic issue in public policy analysis (Burstein 1991; Dubois 1999; Tissot 2007). The many studies that are part of it show how categories are institutionalized around new government structures (ministries, secretaries of state), networks of actors and principles of intervention. However, the transversal dimension of the digital revolution contributes to blurring the boundaries of these categories, which are antagonistically seized by the various government agents: it thus creates a tension between the omnipresence of the “digital” category and the dilution of its unity in ...