A Hamster Trapped in a Wheel

It is pretty late right now and I have been spinning my wheels trying to come up with a good topic to write about with regards to standards. I watched people mill about on a train searching for empty two seaters before giving up and sitting in a three seater one space over from the person already sitting at the window. I watched many people ignore the pleas of the homeless at the train station and almost as many listened only to give the token response of "Sorry I don't have any change." It's the usual stuff, happens every day. Very standard stuff resulting from societal norms in the area which function as informal standards for how people should conduct themselves.

Now this has always struck me as weird as in computer science I'll often see programs, frameworks, or software that either don't follow the set standards or only follow some of the standards. So why are the informal standards provided through societal norms followed more closely than standards in other areas?

First let's look way back to when cars started to become really popular. Back in the day people would cross the street whenever and wherever they wanted to, but with the advent of the car people couldn't just cross whenever and wherever as it was much more dangerous to do so. Cars moved much faster and were much worse at braking than horse drawn carriages so there was a need to specify where pedestrians could cross the street. So they made some standardization for city roads so that cross walks existed but people were not following the rules and were still crossing wherever they wanted to. Nowadays every follows the standard pretty closely, I rarely see people cross outside of a cross walk nowadays. So how did they get to this state? Well....

The main way they got people to follow the rule is by making it seem like people who did jay walk were colossal idiots. Usually standard start to be followed thanks to promises of convenience, improvements, etc which is great if there is no rush on when the standard should be adopted. The cross walk standard needed to be followed immediately, people were getting hurt and brand new cars were getting dented. So, how can you get a bunch of people to all start doing something at the same time? Well, most people just want to lead a quiet life and fit in so the easiest way to get people to follow it is if it was a societal norm. Positioning jay walking as an act done only by truly incompetent people is humiliating and makes them stand out which goes against what Joe Everyman wants for himself. That takes care of most adults and kids will learn by watching everyone else cross at the cross walk.

The informal standards of societal norms are powerful because they satisfy the average person's desire to fit in. Regular standards often have a implementation time period so they don't have to be followed immediately and it is harder to verify that they are being adhered throughout area or project.  Other standards govern things that are not as important or handle things that are convenient so it's easier to justify not following them.