The Closed World

THE CLOSED WORLD
By Paul N. Edwards
The MIT Press, 1996, 440 pages


Most Significant Arguments

In The Closed World there are two themes that stand out most to me. The first is that of metaphor. It is everywhere in the narrative. There are specific even chapters that focus on metaphoric meaning in language around technology (especially computers), and also how leaders viewed the technology they were creating (or funding) metaphorically to help make strategic decisions.

I was more interested in the area of systems. On page 107 Edwards proposes three versions of a closed-world. The west, the USSR and the globe. The last of these three rings truest to me because in either of the other two, the closed worlds of the west and the USSR were not making decisions in a vacuum. Each made decisions based their perspectives on what the other was doing, or would do in a given circumstance. In other words, neither of those systems were independent actors. Each were acting in a system that included the other. Only the third “system” seems accurate to me.

Comparison with Other Readings

On page 109 Edwards speaks to two “leaky containers” in the west and USSR world view and strategic technology. He was describing the “discourse” between these two systems as less defined and changing. In a way this sounded to me a lot like Oudshoorn and Pinch’s arguments around users and non-users. If the west was isolating itself technically, politically, and economically from the USSR, and vice-versa, then each was defining the other (or themselves) as non-users of the opposing system. Edwards even uses the idea of zero-sum game theory later to describe the strategic approach of early US policy architects like McNamara. Yet, just as the line between users and non-users in the earlier works were “complicated” since people might move between those categories, so too are the leaky containers in that changes in technology and strategy moved based on perceived decisions by the other "player" in the zero-sum game. Just as Oudshoorn and Pinch argued that non-users matter, Edwards makes the case that the opposing “closed world” mattered.

Strengths and Weaknesses

In this work, Edwards often focuses on individual contributors to the history. I’m not sure how to think about that approach. On the one hand, these are significant contributors and each example given points out people who seriously influenced the historical and technological progression. Most histories include significant individual contributors. On the other hand focusing so often on a handful of specific people might lead to the impression that few others were involved. For example there are a number of times when Edwards mentions multiple organizations working in parallel on similar issues, but he only mentions specific people in certain organizations. By doing that, the organizations the specific people mentioned are affiliated with seem more influential than those groups only identified as a group. That “importance” of one group over another might be intentional based on the author’s ideas about the relative influence of each group, but perhaps other authors would disagree about the level of influence among the groups.

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