Mediatized Sapiens: Communicational knowledge

Mario Carlón 132 als, previously “media witnesses” of the event, fully intervene as face-to-face actors, intersubjective producers, and key producers of circulation. Thus, for example, the humorous counter-current did not emerge later as it would have done in the era of mass media, but rather it did so in the present. Although in the contemporary era the after continues to be the moment of debate, it is no longer the expected, major moment, much less a closing instance; it is just another moment of the semiotic guerrillas for the circulation of meaning, which will have its disputes with the new events that take by assault, at every moment, the social agenda. The after does not establish the moment in which the event ceases to be media and becomes part of our intersubjective reality because the event is profound- ly media and intersubjective before, during, and after. This set of transformations verification allows us to sustain the passage from the postmodern to the contemporary. But perhaps they do not sufficiently explain to us what the transformation lies on. One possible reading is that the logic of the after, which was the moment of the spectator, his activity, that moment in which “social events begin to have multiple existences, outside the media: they are taken up again to infinity in the word of the social actors, a word that is not ‘media’” (VERÓN); thanks to the new mediatization, it seems to have spread to before and during - that’s why they pre-build, why they generate in it during counter-currents. In other words: the before (past) and the dur- ing (present) are strongly affected by the logic of the after. This conclusion, well seen, is not contradictory with the analyses that postulate the omnipresence of presentism in the contemporary era (HARTOG, 2007 [2003])11 because the after in the age of mass media was the true time of appropriation and social processing of the event. Actions that could only be done because that after was actually a new present, in which they ap11 A hypothesis that can be postulated is that in addition to the emergence of a new media system and new circulation conditions, the contemporary transformation is based, as authors such as Francois Hartog (2007 [2003]) have pointed out, on a time crisis: a moment in which “the articulations between the past, the present, and the future cease to seem obvious” (38). For Hartog, we live in a time in which the point of view of the present prevails, presentism.

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