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3. Standards are deployed in making things work together over distance and heterogeneous metrics. For example, computer protocols for Internet communication involve a cascade of standards (Abbate and Kahin 1995) that need to work together well for the average user to gain seamless access to the web of information. There are standards for the components to link from your computer to the phone network, for coding and decoding binary streams as sound, for sending messages from one network to another, for attaching documents to messages, and so forth. |
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4. Legal bodies often enforce standards, be these mandated by professional organizations, manufacturers' organizations, or the state. We might say tomorrow that volapük, a universal language that boasted some twenty-three journals in 1889 (Proust 1989, 580), or its successor Esperanto shall henceforth be the standard language for international diplomacy. Without a mechanism of enforcement, however, or a grassroots movement, we shall fail. |
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5. There is no natural law that the best standard shall winQWERTY, Lotus 123, DOS, and VHS are often cited as examples in this context. The standards that do win may do so for a variety of other reasons: they build on an installed base, they had better marketing at the outset, or they were used by a community of gatekeepers who favored their use. Sometimes standards win due to an outright conspiracy, as in the case of the gas refrigerator documented by Cowan (1985). |
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6. Standards have significant inertia and can be very difficult and expensive to change. |
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It was possible to build a cathedral like Chartres without standard representations (blueprints) and standard building materials such as regular sizes for stones, tools, and so forth (Turnbull 1993). People invented an amazing array of analog measuring devices (such as string lengths). Each cathedral town posted the local analog metric (a length of metal) at its gates, so that peripatetic master builders could calibrate their work to it when they arrived in the town. They did not have a wide-scale measurement system such as our modern metric or decimal systems. (Whether as a result of this local improvisation or not, Turnbull notes, many cathedrals did fall down!) |
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It is no longer possible to build a complex collective project without standardized measurements. Consider a modern housing development where so much needs to come together from distant and proximate sourceselectricity, gas, sewer, timber sizes, screws, nails and so |
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