SoLiXG:The Social Life
The Social Life
By social life we refer to relationships that exists between individuals and move through individuals. Ceaselessly interiorised and exteriorised, these relationships are mediated by technological and semiotic systems that condition cognition, senses, and emotion. In our period, social life is increasingly mediated and formatted by digital media and platforms. In this project, social life is understood as the surface of interactions, connections, frictions, contestations, continuities, and negotiations that emerge from and in every level of digital infrastructure. The Open System Interconnection-model (OSI), a conceptual framework designed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), divides telecommunication technology into seven or eight layers. The first seven are the physical layer, the data link layer, the network layer, transport layer, the session layer, the presentation layer, and the application layer.
These layers describe the technical aspects of transmitting sine waves, access to radio frequency, construction of wires, cables, and data centres, routing and directing data, and user applications such as Facebook or TikTok. All these technological layers are permeated by the social. For instance, the technical transmission of sine waves depends on the radiofrequency they are transmitted. In turn, the state auctions off spectrum to the highest biding operator. The distribution of spectrum is territorially bound but negotiated between nations and industries that are members in ITU. Another social surface concerns the geopolitics of ownership and location of data centres, fibre-optic cables, and cell phone towers. A third example of how the social permeates the technical is the production of data and the value extracted from the seventh layer, the application layer. Expert in the field speak of an eight layer, which is not a technical layer but an acknowledgement of the social. It refers to the legal and political aspects of layer seven – the consumer application – and user rights, but also regulations regarding integrity versus the law of intercept, which gives state agencies the authority to access and decode traffic.
Hence, while the social life of XG recognizes the social implications of rapidly increasing digitization and digital technologies, such as smart phones and internet of things, it also seeks to bring clarity to the social life that takes place in various shapes along all the layers of digital infrastructure, and to the ways in which this contributes to social transformation in a more general sense.
The Social Life (Reworked)
In its broadest sense, "social life" can refer to the entirety of relationships that exist between humans. These relationships are the product of practices - of repeatedly doing, saying and thinking things - , shaped by cognition, senses and emotions. It includes interactions and connections, frictions and contestations, ruptures and continuities. In our current moment, social practices are thoroughly mediated and formatted by digital media and their underlying infrastructures. A first results is that any investigation of "the social life of XG" asks: How do digital infrastructures shape the practices of social life?
Asking such a question has to acknowledge that digital infrastructures are themselves entwined with social practices, and that technology is inseparable from society. A complex infrastructure, such as the World Wide Web, is not external to, but a product of social processes. It is conceptualized by institutions such as the ITU or the ISO, who picture it as a kind of stack that consists of around seven layers. These range from the physical layer of cables and antennas, to the transport layer of transmission protocols and data packets, up to the application layer, where users interact with Facebook or TikTok.
Some experts half-jokingly talk about a "Layer 8" when discussing the role of society and politics on the internet architecture. They mainly refer to regulations of user rights, but also regarding the authority of states to access and decode traffic. But rather than just another layer in some imagined stack, social practices suffuse *all* levels of digital infrastructure. Radio spectrum, enabling the physical transmission of radio signals necessary for global communication, is imagined as a resources that states make available for competition between network operators, and whose distribution is territorially negotiated between nations and industries. The ownership and location of submarine cables, cell phone towers and data centres has become a topic of geopolitical interest. The protocols that determine packet transmission are the result of negotiations at standardization institutions and a topic of conflicts for definitional power.
Hence, while the social life of XG recognizes the social implications of rapidly increasing digitization and digital technologies, such as smart phones and internet of things, it also seeks to bring clarity to the social life that takes place in various shapes along all the layers of digital infrastructure, and to the ways in which this contributes to social transformation in a more general sense.