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

Natalia Raimondo Anselmino 136 tional media: only one of the five newspapers, whose discourse was analyzed, published a note about it; at the same time, a clear decrease in the discourses published on Facebook or Twitter was observed (see Image 8). Under this, the protagonists organizing the mobiliza- tion expressed, during the in-depth interviews, the difficulty they noted in sustaining the commitment of the general public and achieving higher popular involvement, beyond the reaction and catharsis aroused by the conjuncture. Because the manifes- tation of affection — that is, its materialization in some sensitive medium, and, above all, its mediatization through varied media phenomena — serves to call, but is not enough to achieve, by itself and without other slogans, that collective actions of this type last in time. Usually, this type of local protests, anchored on the complaints about “insecurity” and the request for “justice,” tend to be relatively short-lived. They do not persist beyond the exis- tence of some cells with more active members —often belong- ing to the group of relatives of the victims of insecurity— who are renewed and generate actions of minor scope. Among other things, because what unites them is, above all, the personal dra- ma and a generalized emotional state. To this are added broad and diffuse slogans, built from a sociological pre-notion (KES- SLER, 2015) such as “insecurity” and an abstract value such as “justice,” both difficult terms to translate into concrete public policy actions in the short term. Consider the manifest differ- ence of these more elusive slogans with others such as those of “alive appearance” or “trial and punishment of the ones respon- sible for disappearances and State Terrorism” that were held, for so many decades, by the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, in Argentina. To close, it remains to remember, bringing up again the reflections of Dahlgren (2018), that the commitment to partic - ipation depends on the conditions in which each civic culture finds itself; that is, it depends on those resources that are pre- requisites of the participation, among others: relevant knowl- edge, democratic values, trust in institutions, or self-perception as a political actor with the power to transform.