David Gugerli

Since the early 1960s, digital telecommunication has become a very important social and technological project. Many forms of private, administrative, business, and military communication have dramatically increased their flexibility. The new range of possibilities (shared computing resources, integrated telephone services, electronic data exchange, standardized fax transmission, mobile phones, e-mail services, internet applications, local area networks, interactive television, video conferencing and much more) required new ways of political, institutional, economic and technical integration both on a global and on a national level. Crucial issues like privacy, access, control, security, reliability, market structures, and the role of public utilities underwent fundamental changes. They had to be redefined, reassured, and reorganized.

It is beyond any doubt, that the introduction of digital telecommunication was connected with a historic switch in time - the social patterns of communication fundamentally changed wherever its technical patterns have been altered. Technological change, however, has never been the cause, but rather the means of social change. The research initiative "Switching Patterns" wants to pay attention to this important difference between cause and means by systematically linking the technical patterns with the patterns of social strategies in the development of digital telecommunication devices and the structure, topology, and dynamics of its networks.

"Switching Patterns" comprises various research projects of the program for the history of technology at ETH, all of which investigate the manifold conditions of sociotechnical change in telecommunication during the last 40 years. The research initiative aims at explaining the chances and threats, the offers and limits, the concepts and realities, and the interests and hopes, which have been and still are connected with the emergence of a wide range of digital telecommunication technologies.