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

Individuals, collectives, and polarization in the unstable situation caused by mediatization and... 245 3. Why is society polarized? An answer from the analysis of political science and big data In this development of deep individualism and per- sonalization, how to explain polarization? In a significant study on political polarization and social networks, the researcher Ernesto Calvo (University of Maryland) stated that the logics of media networks favor the generation of strongly polarized sce- narios in the political field . In Political Anatomy of Twitter in Ar- gentina. Tweeting #Nisman (CALVO, 2015), Calvo showed how two strongly polarized communities acted on Twitter following the prosecutor›s death on January 18, 2015 3 . Nisman was the one who was in charge of the investigation of the terrorist at- tack on the AMIA (Israeli Mutual Association Argentina) that happened in 1994 in the city of Buenos Aires, which caused more than eighty deaths. A few days before his body was found dead, the prosecutor denounced President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in a television program for having built an “impu- nity pact” with Iran, a country that Nisman had held responsi- ble, along with other actors, such as the SIDE 4 and the United States, for the attack through the Hezbollah group. Relying on the perspective of the “echo chamber,” Calvo maintains that “so- cial networks are an echo chamber, which permanently returns messages that are consistent with our prejudices” (ibid., p. 14). Thus, the author distinguishes, on Twitter, two large communi- ties, the government and the opposition, based on the presence of different narratives - on the one hand, that of suicide, enunci- ated by adherents to the government; on the other hand, that of murder and the “suicided,” supported by those of the opposition. To make what we are pointing out clearer, let’s see the following graph with which Calvo illustrated the positioning of these com- munities on Twitter: 3 His death gave rise to a riveting documentary, Nisman: the Prosecutor, the Pres- ident, and the Spy directed by English Justin Webster and produced by Netflix, which was released, on the platform, in 2019. 4 The SIDE, later renamed, was the Secretary of State Intelligence, the institu- tional space for spies in Argentina.