Quilt INC/STANDARDIZATION

STANDARDIZATION

- bit of a fictional intro

Bzzzt bzzt error of approval. This bug does not have followed standardized procedure.

   - what is the keyword? our definition

From what I read / think / assume, standardization means to bring things, stuff, objects into one standard. And that to me is quite troublesome because when a norm or standard is made, there always will be conflicts with the things that are not standard. But then again, adaptation, nuance and contextualization are in place.

   - annotation of text/(the reference of the source)   

Four questions before introducing:

1. how can objects inhabit multiple contexts at once, and have both local and shared meaning?
2. how can people living in one community, and drawing their meanings from other people and objects situated there, communicate in another
3. what is the relationship between the two?
4. what range of solutions to the preceding three questions are possible, and what consequences attend each of them —cui bono?

Standardization has been one of the common solutions to this class of problems: 3 if the

interfaces and formats are standard across contexts, then at least the first three questions

become clear, and the fourth becomes moot. But we know from a long and gory

history of attempts to standardize information systems that standards don’t remain

standard for very long, and that one person’s standard is another’s confusion and mess

( Gasser 1986 ; Star 1991 ).

Noun. solutionism (uncountable) The belief that all difficulties have benign solutions, often of a technocratic nature. quotations ▼ The providing of a solution or solutions to a customer or client (sometimes before a problem has been identified).

important question:

how to preserve the integrity of information without a

priori standardization and its attendant violence

Naturalization in response to standardization:

I mean stripping away the contingencies of an object’s creation and its situated

nature. A naturalized object has lost its aura of anthropological strangeness, and is

in a sense “de-situated” in that members have forgotten the local nature of the object’s

meaning. 4 We no longer think much about the miracle of plugging a light into a socket

4

and obtaining illumination, and must make an effort of anthropological imagination

to remind ourselves of contexts in which it is still unnaturalized.

..

Objects exist, with respect to a community of practice, along a trajectory of naturalization,

which has elements of both ambiguity and duration. It is not predetermined

whether an object will ever become naturalized or how long it will remain so—rather,

practice/activity is required to make it so and keep it so.

...

Anomalies or interruptions, the cause of contingency,

come when some person or object interrupts the flow of expectations. One

reason that “glass box technology” or pure transparency is impossible is that anomalies

always arise when multiple communities of practice come together, and useful technologies

cannot be designed in all communities at once. Monsters arise when the legitimacy

of that multiplicity is denied.

Transparency is in theory the endpoint of the trajectory of naturalization, as complete

legitimacy or centrality is the end point of the trajectory of membership in a

community of practice. However, due to the multiplicity of membership of all people,

and the persistence of newcomers and strangers, a well as the multiplicity of naturalization

of objects, this is inherently nonexistent in the real world. For those brief historical

moments where it seems to be the case, it is unstable.

But what are the things that make objects and statuses seem given, durable, real?

Several things coalesce.

Generalization is also named in relation.as well as denaturalization