Open Standards And The Digital Age: History, Ideology, And Networks

Description

How did openness become a foundational value for the networks of the twenty-first century? Open Standards and the Digital Age answers this question through an interdisciplinary history of information networks that pays close attention to the politics of standardization. For much of the twentieth century, information networks such as the monopoly Bell System and the American military's Arpanet were closed systems subject to centralized control. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, engineers in the United States and Europe experimented with design strategies to create new digital networks. In the process, they embraced discourses of "openness" to describe their ideological commitments to entrepreneurship, technological innovation, and participatory democracy. The rhetoric of openness has flourished - for example, in movements for open government, open source software, and open access publishing - but such rhetoric also obscures the ways the Internet and other "open" systems still depend heavily on hierarchical forms of control. Half title page......Page 2 Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise......Page 4 Title page......Page 6 Copyright page......Page 8 Dedication......Page 10 Contents......Page 11 Tables and Figures......Page 13 Acknowledgments......Page 15 List of Acronyms......Page 19 1 . Introduction......Page 23 2 . Ideological Origins of Open Standards I: Telegraph and Engineering Standards, 1860s–1900s......Page 41 3 . Ideological Origins of Open Standards II: American Standards, 1910s–1930s......Page 66 4 . Standardization and the Monopoly Bell System, 1880s–1930s......Page 95 5 . Critiques of Centralized Control, 1930s–1970s......Page 122 6 . International Standards for the Convergence of Computers and Communications, 1960s–1970s......Page 144 7 . Open Systems and the Limits of Democratic Design, 1970s–1980s......Page 172 8 . The Internet and the Advantages of Autocratic Design, 1970s–1990s......Page 196 9 . Conclusion: Open Standards and an Open World......Page 221 Bibliography......Page 236 Index......Page 248