The Role of Institutions in the Design of Communication Technologies

Rajiv C. Shah, and Jay P. Kesan

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 10/27/2001)

Communication technologies contain embedded values that affect our society's fundamental values, such as privacy, freedom of speech, and the protection of intellectual property. Researchers have shown the design of technologies is not autonomous but shaped by conflicting social groups. Consequently, communication technologies contain different values when designed by different social groups. Continuing in this vein, we argue that the institutions where communication technologies are designed and developed are an important source of the values of communication technologies. We use the term code to collectively refer to the hardware and software of communication technologies. Institutions differ in their motivations, structure, and susceptibility to external influences. First, we focus on the political, economic, social, and legal influences during the development of communication technologies. The institutional reactions to these influences are embodied in code. Second, we focus on the decision-making issues in the review process for code. This process determines the code’s content and affects the dissemination of code through the decision whether to publicly release the code. Our analysis focuses on four institutional environments: universities, firms, open source movement, and consortia, which have contributed to the development of the Internet. To study these institutions we chose four historical case studies. They are: NCSA Mosaic developed at the University of Illinois; cookies developed by Netscape; the Apache web server developed by the open source movement; and the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).