Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks
Andrew L. Russell · 2014
How did 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 has flourished - for example, in movements for government, source software, and access publishing - but such rhetoric also obscures the ways the Internet and other open systems still depend heavily on hierarchical forms of control.