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

Mario Carlón 246 Figure 1- The map of Argentine politics seen through the retweets of the #Nisman case Retrieved from: Calvo (2015). To develop this graph, Calvo worked with a spatial anal- ysis model based on the construction of «geographies defined by different users» from the processing of tweets produced bymore than 700,000 accounts 5 . Regarding the functioning of these com- munities as closed and polarized groups, he argues that The greater the connections’ number within the communities, the greater the segregation of the different narratives to which their members are exposed. Those who live in opposition neigh- borhoods receive a disproportionate number of 5 Calvo explains how he has built the research corpus: “As I said before, more than 700,000 Twitter user accounts participated in the #Nisman phenomenon in the first 40 days. However, if we remove all tweets that were not retweeted by other users, only 87,388 accounts survive, representing an 88% reduction in the num- ber of users on the #Nisman social network. If we consider only those tweets that had generated enough interest to be retweeted at least eight times, there are only about 12,000 user accounts left. These 12,000 accounts represent 1.4% of users”(CALVO, 2015, p. 42). Calvo concludes: “Only 1.4% of the users of the #Nisman case produce 59% of the information that was retweeted by this vast social network. Of the more than 3 million retweets related to the #Nisman case, more than 1.8 million are retweets whose original versions were published by 1.4 of the users”(ibid., p. 42).