Shaping infrastructural futures: The International Telecommunication Union’s visions for mobile communications and the anticipatory politics of 5G standardization
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article shows how dominant actors inscribe certain ideas, visions, and predictions of infrastructural futures for international mobile telecommunications through standardization. It argues that standard setting is a key avenue that brings different (and sometimes divergent) interests, groups, concerns, and activities into alignment around a certain vision of social and technological progress. To demonstrate this, two key stages in the 5G standardization process were examined. First, we explored the path to the release of IMT-2020—the standard for 5G networks, devices, and services released by the Radiocommunication Sector of the International Telecommunication Union. Through the standard setting process, two key visions of 5G—one “evolutionary”, the other “revolutionary”—became highly influential ideas of a future worth striving for. Second, we examined how one technical feature of the IMT-2020 standard—the capacity for network slicing—was realized through the work of partner organization the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). In doing so, this article reveals the processes that define the infrastructural conditions that underpin international mobile telecommunications. It also draws attention to how standardization has the potential to redefine the parameters of mobile media and communication in significant ways.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it