Martha Lampland

I was really disappointed by this book. I expected it to be different than it was, plus I think it has some significant weaknesses. I thought it would be more about industry standards and how they worked with technology; I guess because that's what I wanted it to be about. But it is much more general than that, and is really about standardization. Some is interesting, there is a chapter about how chronological age became the dominant way we identify age, and the role of old-age pensions in making age so critical; and there is a chapter about standard physical types for medical experiments; that there was a notion that white men were the standard and now instead of having no standard we have a set of standards for white men, white women, etc. without taking into account (often) the differences within the groups. But some of the other chapters were, I feel, less interesting & didn't have much original content. In addition, the presentation is very academic, with a lot of words spent setting up the story & summarizing the story. The introduction did all that once, so why did each chapter have to do it again? I identified 2 other problems I have with this book: first, while it has a pub date of 2009, many of the citations are from the late 90's or early 00's; I know some of these are just older key works but I got the impression that several of the articles were several years old. And second, there is the nice feature of having shorter newsy articles in the book as well, illustrating the stories being told, but they are not well-chosen and the relevance was not at all clear to me.… (mehr)