By Andrew L. Russell Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emerge

Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise

by Andrew L. Russell

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."

Genres: History

Paperback

First published April 28, 2014

Reviews

[Jory Carson-burson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a truly fascinating book - I would recommend it to anyone interested in history, web standards, and organizational design. Russell shares an ideological perspective on technological innovation that is distinctly different from what is taught in school and circulated in popular media. It has given me a lot to think critically about as a business manager in Open Web technology - I will definitely reference this book in the future and recommend to my colleagues who are working on web standards!

[Matthew Humberstone · Rating 3 out of 5]

The genealogy of 'Openness' is not as you think.
An interesting picking-apart of this engineering Imaginary and a call to a more heterodox approach to governance engineering governance.