Mediatization, polarization, and intolerance (between environments, media, and circulation)

Natalia Raimondo Anselmino 124 All that has been said allows us to think of the phenom- enon’s gestation in terms of what, from the point of view of the semiotics of culture, would be defined as an explosive moment . Unexpectedly, what started with some events on Facebook “ma- terialized on the streets, became a trending topic on Twitter and occupied the agenda of the local - and even national media” (RAI- MONDO ANSELMINO et al., 2018, p. 26). Lotman (1999) distin- guishes explosive moments from long-term processes. Unlike the latter, the former gives rise to timeless brevity , “a casual, unpre- dictable moment [...] [that] breaks through the regular chain of causes and effects” (LOTMAN, 1999, p. VI) and that, in this case, gave rise to a proliferation of different types of social discours- es: the discourse of socio-individual actors mediatized through the connective platforms; the information discourse that made the claim part of socially shared news, beyond all personal ex- perience, and; the political discourse of both the protagonists of the protests and the public officials of the various powers of the State. As Steimberg and Traversa (1997) warned, visibility is always built from discursive processes. As noted above, what made the #RosarioSangra mobi- lizations a case of interest for this investigation was, initially, the fact that the call tomarch circulated exclusively – except for what is restricted to the non-public sphere of interpersonal commu- nication mediated face-to-face – through Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp platforms. It is something that in terms of the ana- lytical model proposed by Carlón (2016) on the circulation of meaning could be thought of, in part, as a horizontal circulation – between users-peers within the networks, and, in part, as a vertical circulation of ascending type – from the bottom up, from the media platforms to the mass media. 3. Call, circulation, and collectives The object of knowledge of this research —that is, the articulation between different regimes of visibility of the dis- courses on the public-political at present, particularly attending to those whose circulation is motorized through what is vulgarly