Telefonia 4G e a constituição do meio técnico-científico-informacional na cidade de Cuiabá

Abstract

The centrality of this doctoral thesis project is the constitution of the technicalscientific-informational environment from the emergence of 4G technology in the cellular telephone system in Cuiabá. In the context of technological transformations, 4G technology has as a typical promise of modernization processes, promoting the replacement of 3G technology, making cities more connected, based on interests of hegemonic domains that foster the installation of the conditioning infrastructure of capitalistic flows. The installation of the telematic network has its bases in the Radio Base Stations (ERBs) that configure the communication nodes in the cities constituting the flow spaces, thus promoting conditions for updating the globalized capital that always seeks new markets. This relationship between local spaces and globalized capital is responsible for what we understand here as globalization. The mechanisms for the globalization process are hegemonic techniques that are updated in hegemonizing technologies responsible, in large scale, for the subordination of societies constituted to always update themselves as consumers of such technologies. The present research, taking the city of Cuiabá as an empirical framework for answering general technology questions, is based on primary and secondary sources. It seeks to answer questions about the historical emergence of 4G technology; analyzes how it becomes hegemonic technology; find out how analog turned digital, providing the ability to transmit any kind of binary information and in this way the concept of broadband is established; find out how the infrastructure that is built from the ERBs becomes a fundamental part of the city's 4G network. It seeks to analyze how the war of places is constituted from the installation of telephone infrastructure; From an interdisciplinary perspective, the project demands updating of this debate about the constant technological transformations and their reverberation in the spheres of politics, economy and culture. We seek to define and understand the fundamental concepts of 4G technology as an applied technique, having as questions the crossing of technological development in several areas of knowledge, in the definition, simultaneously technical, political and economic, of what, after all, some notions present in the consumer life: bandwidth, connectivity, and key differences between 3G and 4G technologies. From the perspective of urbanist Manuel Castells, we analyze the characterization of the city as a “space of flows” and, from the perspective of geographer Milton Santos, the transformation of the “technical-scientific-informational environment” as an experience of urban modernization. The space of flows and the technical-scientific-informational environment become vectors that designate the city's connectivity, defining its place in the urban network on a regional, national and international scale. From the empirical data that are announced, the characterization of the city in contemporary times, established by various connections, is discussed, having 4G technology as one of the structuring and updating elements of informational capitalism.