Creating Information Infrastructure for Transnational Co-operation in Television: Nordvision in the 1960s–1970s

Abstract

<p>Nordic public service television organizations launched Nordvision in 1959 to organize television programme exchange and co-productions, and the network remains active today. This chapter concentrates on a period at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s when Nordvision reorganized its working practices, to trace how Nordvision developed information infrastructure that would support transnational collaboration in television. A key problem for Nordvision was how to ensure the efficient exchange of information necessary for transnational co-operation. This chapter discusses Nordvision’s efforts to develop its information infrastructure consisting of an active meeting culture, paper documents and media technologies such as telephone and video, to understand how Nordvision defined challenges relating to Nordic co-operation and attempted to solve them. Through this lens, this chapter considers how television has contributed to constructing the Nordic region, not by analysing how Nordicness was represented on television screens, but by focusing on the behind-the-scenes work of developing Nordic co-operation networks.</p>