[Research proposal] Internet for Us: sociotechnical world building with 5G infrastructures
By Oscar Fossum
Abstract:
5G internet is expected to bring nearly real-time speeds to telecommunications, and is often referenced as the essential technological next step in enabling the network of “smart” devices known as the Internet of Things (IoT) and even “smart” urban infrastructure. Preliminary research has indicated that 5G technologies may simultaneously enable greater social freedoms, and conversely, greater social control. This research poses 5G internet as a sociotechnical world building project, and investigates how 5G devices act upon their users to enact these ideals. This research project begins in NYC at the same time as the commercial deployment of 5G internet. As a major global city, NYC provides an important case study into the adoption and use of 5G internet technologies in high-tech metropolitan areas. Drawing on a body of research from sociotechnical studies and anthropology, this research investigates multi-actor networks within emerging 5G technological systems. In order to record the influence of 5G technologies on human movement through urban infrastructure, this research conducts surveys with 5G users at 5G internet testing sites in NYC. Observing how people engage with 5G technologies will help us understand how and where 5G technologies might embed themselves in sociotechnical systems around the world. Looking at these technologies and their users as actors in a sociotechnical system, this paper investigates the various ways that human users act upon 5G technologies, and vice versa. Specifically, this paper aims to record how 5G technologies enable some forms of human action, while disabling others.
Internet for Us: Sociotechnical world building with 5G infrastructures
In the fall season of 2019, telecommunications companies like Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T are rolling out 5G internet for commercial testing in New York City. Because 5G technologies are currently in the earliest phases of their commercial deployment, it is unclear how they might influence and shape human behaviors and abilities. Some 5G functionalities enable greater social freedoms, like promoting peer to peer transactions on blockchain technologies, and increasing public access to state of the art technologies. Other 5G functionalities enable panoptic social control, like creating “smart” citizen tracking networks with advanced facial recognition software and social credit scores. 5G technologies simultaneously enable social freedoms and social controls; for example, “smart” city infrastructure technologies enable democratized movement through cities, while also tracking citizens’ personal data at levels of granularity far exceeding prior generations of internet technologies. For these reasons, this research investigates the sociotechnical systems of 5G technologies to uncover specific ways that 5G technologies are inscribed to facilitate human movement through urban infrastructures.
This paper’s concern with human movement focuses both on forms of physical movement through transportation networks, as well as on forms of social movement through information and telecommunications networks. When describing infrastructures, this research highlights the devices and nodes within transportation and telecommunications networks, and considers how 5G technologies act upon nodes in these networks. With these definitions of human movement and infrastructure networks in mind, this paper asks: how do 5G technologies influence human movement within urban infrastructures? In this question, we probe the world building project enacted by 5G technologies by investigating the relationships formed through the provision of internet. We look at the forms of human to human relationships, and human to machine relationships enabled by 5G internet. Interviews with internet users, developers and companies aim to reveal the ways these actors conceptualize and deploy 5G internet technologies. Addressing the numerous and sometimes conflicting values within the 5G internet ecosystem presents us with an understanding of how 5G is conceptualized. Next, looking to how 5G internet technologies are actually used illustrates how 5G technologies are deployed by designers, and reinterpreted by their human users.
This research investigates how 5G technologies form complex networks with their human users, and act upon their human users to both constrain and enable certain forms of human movement through urban infrastructures. In my preliminary research, I have identified trends that 5G technologies may either enable the centralization or decentralization of authority over sociotechnical systems. As a tool for centralized authority, 5G technologies encourage individual self-discipline as a sort of hypermodern panopticism. As a tool for decentralized authority, 5G technologies encourage technological innovation, and democratized access to advanced technologies. I present this research project as a timely endeavor to uncover how 5G technologies may be deployed in New York City to enact political ideals through their integration with the sociotechnical infrastructures that facilitate modern human life. This research asks: what forms of human movement do 5G technologies reward? How might 5G technologies reproduce and reshape forms of human movement, and what do those normative forms illustrate about the “intended users” of 5G technologies in New York City? This project serves as an initial installment to a larger investigation of the inscribed political goals within 5G technologies on a global scale — a continuing research project which will take place through May 2021. At the heart of this research project lies a concern with 5G internet’s potential to enable both forms of social freedoms, and forms of social control.
Literature Review:
At the outset of this research project, American telecommunications companies are just beginning commercial 5G internet testing in New York City. As 5G internet is still in its earliest phases of widespread deployment, the current public conversation around 5G internet and its associated technologies is largely led by technical testing reports and forward-looking statements from telecom agencies, as well as anticipatory policies put forth by national actors and policy-making bodies. This research project aims to be one of the first academic investigations of 5G technologies and their effects on human organization in urban spaces. In the section that follows, I outline some of the key areas of existing research related to technologies and their effects on societies, as well as existing research specifically related to 5G internet technologies.
This work draws on anthropological and sociotechnical research, including works from Caliskan & Callon, Akrich, Winner, Deleuze and Guattari, and Foucault. These works come together to show how technologies and humans act upon each other and form complex sociotechnical systems. Key to this discussion, Caliskan & Callon’s theory of sociotechnical agencements (STAs) uses a French loanword to consider the arrangements of agencies (i.e. agencements) of human and nonhuman actors who act upon each other in sociotechnical systems. Caliskan & Callon’s concept of STAs hearkens Callon, Latour and other sociotechnical scholars’ idea of actor-networks, but more explicitly highlights the heterogeneity of actor types, as well as the active agencies exerted by the actors within these STAs. Akrich, Winner and other sociotechnical scholars demonstrate how political goals are enacted through scripts in technologies which enable certain human actions and behaviors, and constrain others. The idea of scripts or inscription proposes that technologies are imbued with material attributes which facilitate the “correct” usage of the technologies. In other words, much can be learned about the intended use of technologies purely through an analysis of their material architectures. Deleuze & Guattari (1994), and Thatcher, O’Sullivan & Mahmoudi (2016) help demonstrate how data can be used by states and corporations to harness the productive powers of a population. These works come together to show how technologies and humans act upon each other and form complex sociotechnical systems, and how states and corporations exert control over populations through quantification, categorization, and data collection. Within the context of this research, I will use ideas from these scholars to show how 5G internet poses questions of power and politics exerted through technology.
A knowledge of the material infrastructures of 5G technologies is imperative to my analysis of how they are inscribed to communicate with their human users. This research presents an explanation of 5G infrastructures with the help of technical whitepapers describing the material demands of 5G internet, as well as an on-the-ground observation of physical 5G infrastructures as they emerge in NYC. Toward existing studies done on 5G internet, I look to technical whitepapers and implementation plans that exemplify the current 5G concerns from a technical standpoint. Greengard, S. (2015) helps describe some of the many applications of the “Internet of Things” (IoT). The International Telecommunication Union (2018) addresses opportunities and challenges within the massive infrastructural project of establishing 5G internet. Rodriguez, J. (2015) describes in detail how 5G internet works utilizing millimeter wave frequencies and small cell base stations. The Verizon presentation of their 5G partners at the Consumer Electronics Show illustrates a few use-cases of 5G internet, including automated delivery drone fleets (2019). “5G Internet of Things: A survey” (2019) by Shancang Li, Li Da Xu, Shanshan Zhao addresses technical challenges in 5G enabled IoT devices, including heightened security risks and privacy concerns, and difficulty of integrating heterogeneous devices on a single network. These whitepapers and technical reports demonstrate a current struggle to define industry standards in the new 5G paradigm. Thus, one challenge facing the 5G ecosystem is the question of organization around technical standards. To ask the inverse question, how might the standardardization of 5G internet technology frameworks affect human organization?
Briefings and reports from national actors and associated standards bureaus reflects the state of 5G concerns from a policy perspective. For example, the “US Policy on 5G” briefing from the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Press Centers notes that 5G internet carries international implications “from a political perspective, an economic perspective, as well as from a national security perspective.” (United States Department of State. 2019). Also, a report from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) outlines three main goals of action to launch nationwide 5G internet quickly, and safely. These action goals are making additional spectrum available for commercial 5G use, “updating infrastructure policy and encouraging the private sector to invest in 5G networks” and “modernizing outdated regulations.” (Federal Communications Commission. 2019). These briefings reflect national concerns over international data privacy and cyber-security in a 5G internet paradigm. Additionally, it is noteworthy that the federal push for 5G internet follows an American liberal market logic. These briefings, and others from various US state bodies help demonstrate the national political interests embedded in the race to 5G (see: O’Rielly. (2019); Trump, D. (2017); U. S. Chamber of Commerce. (2017)).
In the above literature review, I have outlined three focus areas of existing research which allow us to tackle 5G internet deployment from different angles. These three areas — academic research, technical research and development, and political and economic policymaking — address many of the current sites of interest in 5G internet development. Namely, existing works establish that 5G internet poses issues of data security on both individual and national scales. Some of these works go so far as to question the ethical issues associated with 5G development. Missing from this conversation, however, is an analysis of the human behaviors that 5G technologies encourage. Looking at the material assemblages of 5G internet infrastructures, as well as at the imaginaries of future 5G technologies, will illuminate how they act upon and reorganize urban spaces and forms of human movement. How will 5G technologies change the way humans move through urban spaces? Will 5G technologies enable new forms of human action, or even disable current forms of human action? It is in this gap of existing public knowledge that I propose my own research project.
Methods:
This research project investigates how 5G internet infrastructures redefine urban spatial relationships and forms of human movement and sociality in New York City. In an effort to capture the human voices and stories surrounding 5G internet infrastructures, this research project undertakes a series of recorded interviews with telecommunications providers in NYC. This list of providers could include dominant telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T, but also insurgent community-based internet networks in Brooklyn and Manhattan, like NYC Mesh and Red Hook Initiative. Interviews with representatives from each group of telecommunications providers will investigate the world building that happens through the provision (or lack thereof) of internet infrastructures. Because of the local scale of the community-based internet networks, I will have an easier time finding “informants” at different levels of the network, including technicians, volunteers, and customers who can speak to claims of space that are made through the provision of an insurgent — though licit — internet infrastructure. Against this backdrop of grassroots internet provision, interviews with larger telecommunications companies aim to understand the new claims to space that are being made in the corporate push to establish 5G internet infrastructures.
The other main group of interview subjects are the human users of internet technologies. As 5G internet begins its commercial rollout in NYC, 5G technologies will begin to appear as consumer items. This research project conducts interviews with people with 5G technologies and people without 5G technologies to observe the social realities that are constructed through 5G internet access. Because 5G internet technologies may take a few years to become dominant consumer goods, interviews conducted throughout this period of 5G commercial deployment aim to capture changes — if there are any — in how humans engage with their technologies. This investigation into the real-life usage of 5G technologies and non-5G technologies helps us understand not only how these technologies constrain and enable certain behaviors in their urban settings, but also how these technologies are reshaped by their users as they explore the boundaries of their constraints.
The De-Scription of Technical Objects by Madeleine Akrich is a central text inspiring the methods of this research project on 5G internet infrastructures. To complete her sociotechnical research project, Akrich says she had to “move constantly between the technical and the social” using two primary methods — "the first has to do with the extent to which the composition of a technical object constrains actants in the way they relate both to the object and to one another. The second concerns the character of these actants and their links, the extent to which they are able to reshape the object, and the various ways in which the object may be used” (p.206).
Akrich looks at technical objects that are adapted for new contexts through a process she terms "technology transfer” — “where objects and their supposed functions, or the relationship between supply and demand, are poorly matched" (p.207). Akrich’s case-study of a photoelectric lighting kit provides an example of of misadapting first-world technologies to "less developed countries," and the resulting creation of a non-user. This research is done by observing the real-life usage of technologies in-situ. Akrich details many designed aspects of the photoelectric lighting kit that fail to meet the needs of its users, like nonadjustable wiring, and rigid yet infrequent maintenance scheduling. By capturing these failures, she illustrates how designed technologies overlook critical needs of people in non-normative technological circumstances.
Akrich analyzes the interfaces of communication between human and nonhuman actors to show how technologies "generate and 'naturalize' new forms and orders of causality and, indeed, new forms of knowledge about the world" (p.207). To do so, she says, "we have to go back and forth continually between the designer and the user, between the designer's projected user and the real user, between the world inscribed in the object and the world described by its displacement" (p.208-209). Through this multi-actor approach, Akrich investigates the exclusions that happen in design. In capturing these moments of exclusion, she identifies the worldviews that are reinforced through technologies.
Situated in New York City, this project focuses on the internet experiences in both highly dense commercial zones — like Chelsea in Manhattan, or Williamsburg in Brooklyn — and neighborhoods more removed from big commercial hubs, like Bedford-Stuyvesant or Red Hook in Brooklyn. This spread of research sites is suggested as a movement between target commercial areas for 5G internet infrastructures and areas in NYC that are more removed from the limelight of commercial attention. The material architecture of 5G internet suggests that it is most commercially viable in densely populated areas. Moving between areas of higher and lower density in NYC, I use Akrich’s notion to observe the “designer's projected user and the real user” and to illustrate the many experiences of people moving through urban spaces with and without 5G technologies. This helps us identify moments of exclusion that happen in 5G internet infrastructures, and further illustrate the claims to space being made through internet provision.
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