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

Individuals, collectives, and polarization in the unstable situation caused by mediatization and... 241 But that was not the only contribution that Verón made to think about the era of mass media (modernity and postmo- dernity). It is possible to argue that taking advantage of the de- bates on postmodernism as a specific time , between the eight- ies and the nineties, he articulated a theory that, in addition to identifying the specificity of mediatization, worked on three other thematic fields: a) that of semiosis or the network semiot- ics (1987); b) that of “communication,” which in its terminol- ogy corresponds to the circulation of meaning as a non-linear phenomenon (1987) and, c) that of “actors” (through which it incorporated institutions, media, and sociological notions, col- lectives, and individuals as signs temporarily located in the semiotic network) (VERÓN, 1994, 1999). After these texts, he wrote a series of essays in which he made very valuable clarifications. One of them is “Conversa - tion about the future” (VERÓN 2001), in which he specified his hypotheses on mediatization and circulation (under names such as lag and divergence) and on what role do social actors occupy in the articulation of these fields, particularly individuals 2 . I re- view them quickly. Mediatization and circulation. Verón does not yet speak, in this 2001 text, of the end of television, a thesis that he will develop a few years later, but how he narrates the history of mediatization and circulation already advances his account of a growing gap or divergence between production and recognition. The era after the Second World War until the 1970s, of consoli- dation of television, management, and marketing, is for Verón the one with the smallest gap and the largest convergence: In the period ranging from the end of the Second World War to the 1970s, management and mar- keting theories and their precise and proven tech- niques for controlling the articulation between sup- 2 This work was written before those that characterize his last period, which includes his reflections on the “ end ” of a mass medium such as television and its programming capacity for social life (VERÓN, 2006, 2009); the development of a non-anthropo - centric paradigm to conceptualize the new individual and organic enunciators in pub - lic spaces, and the “ access ” revolution as a transformation of circulation of meaning thanks to the Internet (VERÓN, 2013). These elaborations are absent in his texts of the eighties and nineties.