Standards and their Stories | osp blog

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Standards and their Stories

I'm looking forward to the stories that may be unfolding these days here at SVG Open.

[openbook booknumber="/b/OL16960548M"] Here are some quotes from chapter 1 of "Standards and their Stories", edited by Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star. Among other things, this introductory chapter makes a point for the invisibility and pervasiveness of standards :)

standards are so pervasive that they have become taken for granted in our everyday environment, they may become completely embedded in everyday tools of use.

We have to listen to infrastructure and bring imagination to understanding its components and how they work.

With time, this process can lead to what Callon calls "irreversibility" [...] functional irreversibility--what would it take to change the meaning of a red light to "go" and a green light to "stop"?

The strangeness of infraestructure is not the usual sort of anthropological strangeness [...] Infrastructural strangeness is an embedded strangeness, a second-order one, that of the forgotten, the background, the frozen in place.