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

15 Mediation and mediatization Juremir Machado da Silva A seminar that turns into a book. A book that comes into existence as the realization of an idea. Theme: mediatiza- tion. In his famous thesis 4, the French Guy Debord denounced: “The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social rela- tion among people mediated by images” (1992, p. 4). Before Debord, this topic sparked debate. Then, even more. Everything is mediated, mediatized, resized, manipulated; everything is a spectacle, nothing is experienced directly. As always, two major currents of interpretation, roughly speaking, are formed for as- tonishment or boredom: one denounces the excessive power of the media; the other, relativizes. A speech about losses, the colo- nization of consciences, the trivialization of things, entertain- ment transformed into the main article of the emptied existence. The other scoffs at this permanent fear of new technologies and shows progress, achievements, advantages, advances, and posi- tive civilizational changes. Two years ago, walking through the streets of Porto Alegre with my friend Pierre Lévy, an enthusiast of technologi- cal changes and a specialist in “cyberculture,” he spoke of water transporters who were once eliminated by piped water. Does anyone remember them? Would anyone refuse the plumbing to save so many professionals from unemployment? In mediatiza- tion, there is more than mediation, information, entertainment, training, and opinion. What? Perhaps induction, conditioning, domination, control, the definition of a model of behavior. The media is not only an instrument of information and entertain- ment but also, or mainly, a system of social hierarchy and pro- duction of meanings. New technologies emerge. With them, old fears, new anxieties, unprecedented aspects of controversy: