Open Standards and the Digital Age
History, Ideology, and Networks

This book answers how openness became the defining principle of the information age, examining the history of information networks.

Andrew L. Russell (Author)

9781107039193, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 April 2014

326 pages, 8 b/w illus. 3 tables
23.1 x 15.7 x 2.5 cm, 0.65 kg

'Open Standards and the Digital Age is a densely written book based on a significant number of primary sources and a rich, multidisciplinary bibliography. Andrew L. Russell paints on a big canvas, but … summary sections for each chapter, as well as the introduction and conclusion chapters, bring the main threads together to provide a refreshing view on the history of the early communications networks, and particularly of the more recent digital ones.' Dov Lungu, Isis

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.

1. Introduction
2. Ideological origins of open standards I: telegraph and engineering standards, 1860s–1900s
3. Ideological origins of open standards II: American standards, 1910s–30s
4. Standardization and the monopoly Bell System, 1880s–1930s
5. Critiques of centralized control, 1930s–70s
6. International standards for the convergence of computers and communications, 1960s–70s
7. Open systems and the limits of democratic design, 1970s–80s
8. The Internet and the advantages of autocratic design, 1970s–90s
9. Conclusions: open standards and an open world.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]