[Themaintainers] the maintainers: introduction

Andrew Russell arussell at stevens.edu
Thu Mar 19 10:34:30 EDT 2015


>>When you first post to the list, I encourage you to introduce yourself and your work, to say what interests you about "maintenance" writ large and how it might connect to your current and future projects, and also to point us to existing works that connect to our theme.

Hi everyone -

My name is Andy Russell, I work with Lee Vinsel at Stevens, where I am an associate professor of history and director of our STS program. I’m delighted but not surprised to see so much interest in the topics of maintenance, infrastructure, etc. As Lee emphasized in his blog post, these are not new topics and we are not making any novelty claims. Instead, the creation of this list (and panels at SHOT and hopefully elsewhere) indicates widespread dissatisfaction with popular narratives about technology that emphasize “innovation” and “invention” ad nauseum, while ignoring and neglecting aspects of our technological experience and history that are equally if not more significant.

I’m especially excited that the topic of maintenance (and infrastructure and related themes) provides an opportunity for those of us in the history of technology community to build and nurture bridges to other specialties, such as STS, anthropology, labor history, and so on.

My work is primarily in the history of technology, specifically in computing and telecommunications, and more specifically in standards and the social process of standardization. My first book was published in 2014, titled “Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks.” There I examine network standards from the late 19th to the early 21st century, with a close eye on communities of engineers who negotiated so-called “voluntary consensus” standards in engineering societies and custom-made standards-setting organizations such as ANSI, ISO, and the Internet Engineering Task Force. The second half of the book is my revisionist history of the Internet (I prefer the phrase "the history of computer networking"), where I focused on standards-setting processes in Europe and the United States. Standardization and maintenance are closely aligned; and in many ways, they exist in tension with (if not opposition to) innovation. My story is a story of organizations moving slowly and awkwardly, worlds apart from garage inventors and charismatic CEOs.

I’m currently working on a bunch of different projects, including revisions to a paper that Brad Fidler and I presented at SHOT last year on the Defense Communication Agency’s role in the ARPANET and Internet. Our argument is that we can’t explain how the Internet became infrastructure unless we understand the work that the DCA did once it took charge of the ARPANET in 1975. The DCA’s role is exactly the sort of unglamorous, low-status labor that seems to interest so many of us. I’ve been dragging my feet on my part of the revisions (mea culpa Brad!) because I keep finding work on infrastructure that I should already have read, by people in media studies (Shannon Mattern and Nicole Starosielski), anthropology (Brian Larkin and Daniel Miller), STS and Hist-tech (Paul Edwards, Steven Jackson), journalists (Brian Hayes and Andrew Blum), and so on.  I’m inspired by this literature, as well as by the people who have posted to this list so far, because it’s pushing me to think about technology (and ‘things’ and ‘stuff’) in a richer and more rewarding way than accounts that focus narrowly on invention, novelty, and innovation.

I had better stop here - and I am looking forward to hearing from others.

Cheers,

Andy

---------------------------------------

Andrew L. Russell, Ph.D.
Director, Program in Science & Technology Studies
Associate Professor, History
College of Arts & Letters
Stevens Institute of Technology
Hoboken, New Jersey 07030

t. 201-216-5400 || f. 201-216-8245
arussell at stevens.edu<mailto:arussell at stevens.edu> || @RussellProf
www.stevens.edu/cal/sts<http://www.stevens.edu/cal/sts> || www.arussell.org<http://www.arussell.org/>

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks
(Cambridge University Press, 2014 || www.arussell.org/open<http://www.arussell.org/open>)







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