The pandemic intertwining with mediatization 277 b) Mediatization and its new rituals Sociotechnical transformations that have occurred and have accentuated over the last and the current centuries are manifested in the ambiance and social organization, redesign- ing institutions and their practices, robbing them of cooperative and mediating tasks, as is happening with the university. It is no longer a matrix of knowledge mediation, as described above, since a new dynamic of a techno-communicational character affects the nature of cooperative practices, even provoking new ways to its rituals functioning. Industrial capitalism and its de- scendants act on organizations by leaving their “paws” in educational institutions as well as in those dealing with behavior management as “significant machines.” Protocols of various na- tures, many of them equidistant from the mediational values of the time, become not only input but also the matrix that chang- es the DNA of the university institution. Briefly, we discuss, in this article, ballasts of the winds of communicational processes generated in the current stage of mediatization that are trans- forming aspects of teaching and research management, from a cooperative character to another, whose strategies are inspired by deterministic communicational logics, according to the per- spective of convergence theory. Roughly speaking, this theory, which emerges in the ongoing globalization context, states that social organization and its practices are increasingly organized and regulated according to digital, telecommunication, and au- diovisual foundations. Operating in a convergent manner, these dimensions would condense organizing and regulating princi- ples of all socio-symbolic practices involving the production, cir- culation, and management of information. A principle like that is a prerequisite for all institutional practices in their conditions of production, circulation, and reception of social discourses, including university practices. Reality would only be a consequence of the convergence of activities of these three dimen- sions mentioned above, imposing new communicational ratio- nality, whose subsidies are increasingly structuring elements of the social organization in transformation. Briefly, we recall that, in the past, theories inspired the idea that social action with a view to modernization would base on the influence that some
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