Standardization, Diversity, and the Digital Age

Engineers led American society into 20^th century modernity, and they did so by following the logic of standardization.  In the 1920s, for example, the mining engineer Herbert Hoover inspired his colleagues to join a “crusade for standards”—a movement that he considered to be a rational response to disorder, waste, and excess diversity in the American industrial economy.  Hoover and standards advocates such as the mathematician and safety expert Albert Wurts Whitney situated their work within a progressive discourse that emphasized the virtues of efficiency, reliability, and cooperation.  Whitney summarized their worldview in 1924: “Variation is creative, it pioneers the advance; standardization is conservational, it seizes the advance and […] leaves the creative faculties free for the problems that are still unsolved.” 

While the champions of standardization celebrated the reduction of diversity, critics viewed standardization as a reactive and conservative process.  They worried that standardization would create a dull, numb, and mediocre society of grey-shaded conformity—a critical tradition evident in works by Sinclair Lewis (Main Street, 1920), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1932), George Orwell (1984, 1949), Robert and Helen Lynd (Middletown, 1929), Malvina Reynolds (“Little Boxes,” 1962), and many others.

In my contribution to the roundtable discussion, I will summarize the tension between standardization and diversity in the early 20^th century before considering how concepts of standardization and diversity inform historical practice in the digital age.  The benefits of standardization beckon, as we see in professional convergence around digital history tools, institutions, publications, and curricula.  With the past as our guide, we should be mindful that such tendencies toward standardization will also carry with them threats to the diversity and the spirit of democratic experimentation that the late Roy Rosenzweig sought to nurture and to protect.