Standards and their stories : how quantifying, classifying, and formalizing practices shape everyday life

摘要: Standardization is one of the defining aspects modern life, its presence so pervasive that it usually taken for granted. However cumbersome, onerous, or simply puzzling certain standards may be, their fundamental purpose in streamlining procedures, regulating behaviors, and predicting results rarely questioned. Indeed, invisibility infrastructure imperative standardizing processes signify absolute necessity. Increasingly, however, social scientists are beginning to examine origins effects underpin technology practices everyday life.Standards Their Stories explores how we interact with network shape our lives ways both obvious invisible. The main chapters analyze standardization biomedical research, government bureaucracies, insurance industry, labor markets, computer technology, providing detailed accounts invention "standard humans" medical testing life actuarial tables, imposition chronological age as a biographical determinant, accepted means determining productivity, creation international preservation access metadata, global consequences "ASCII imperialism" use English lingua franca Internet.Accompanying these in-depth critiques series examples depict an almost infinite variety standards, from controversies surrounding European Union's supposed regulation banana curvature minimum health requirements immigrants at Ellis Island, conflicting (and ever-increasing) food portion sizes, impact standardized punishment metrics like "Three Strikes" laws. volume begins pioneering essay Susan Leigh Star Martha Lampland on nature brings together strands several fields represented book. In appendix, editors provide guide teaching courses this emerging interdisciplinary field, which they term "infrastructure studies," making Standards ideal scholars, students, those curious about why coffins becoming wider, instance, Financial Accounting Board refused classify September 11 "extraordinary" event.