Metaphors for Democratic Communication Spaces: How Developers of Local Wireless Networks Frame Technology and Urban Space
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Communications policies, like many other social policies, are founded on an ideal of democracy that connects the development of communication infrastructures with democratic public spheres. This framing is a constructivist endeavour that takes place through language, institution, and infrastructure. Projects that aim to develop these capacities must grapple with the way such new media technologies are integrated into existing contexts or spaces, often using metaphors. This article analyzes how such metaphors are employed in the case of local wireless networking. Referring to empirical research on networks located in Montréal and Fredericton, Canada, the article critiques the narrow approach to democratization of communication spaces inherent in networks of this type. This narrow focus is associated with metaphors used to describe a co-evolution of wireless technology and urban space. The article identifies that the design processes that shape these networks could benefit from a more radical democratization associated with metaphors of recombination of space and technology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".