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

Individuals, collectives, and polarization in the unstable situation caused by mediatization and... 255 individualism based on subjectivity are multiple and dynamics . That is why it is not enough to see this logic from production, as understood by powerful enunciators, a phenomenon that we can verify when we observe the behavior of individuals on so- cial media networks, that is, when they are in production (on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etcetera). What we can observe in production is that the logic of showing differ- ent ways continued to expand, providing the contents that they share or producing accentuations that pretend to be unique. On the other hand, the emergence of a new media system based mainly on the Internet and telephone networks should not make us forget the limitations of research that is re- stricted to investigating the logics that is based on a single media system, even if it is the newest, as we saw when we stopped at the “holes” of the echo chamber topic. We live in a hypermedia society, in which at least two media systems coexist, that of the mass media and the one based on the Internet. The new confor- mation of mediatization has not merely enabled individuals and groups to speak; it has done much more than that because it has subjected them to two simultaneous processes. On the one hand, to an increase in complexity, a phenomenon that is known as inherent to mediatization. On the other hand, and our thesis is an increase in instability. Both are inseparable from each other. We can recall here that one of the characteristics of postmodernity (or “liquidmodernity,” according to the terminol- ogy of Zygmunt Bauman (2003 [2000]), based on the space-time transformation that occurred in recent decades, was that not only institutions became more “liquid,” rather they became zom- bies and individuals had to assume new roles 19 . In this classic work, Bauman recalls that Ulrich Beck, another great researcher of postmodern individualism, expressed that “the way one lives 19 Bauman points this out by citing Beck, who in a 1999 interview spoke of “zombie institutions”, “that are dead and still alive” (2003, p. 12), among which he distin - guished “family, class, and neighborhood” (ibid., p. 12). In that note, Beck wonders: “Ask yourself what actually is a family nowadays? What does it mean? Of course there are children, my children, our children. But even parenthood, the core of family life, is beginning to desintegrate under conditions of divorce […] [G]randmothers and grandfathers get included and excluded without any means of participation in the decisions of their sons and daughters. From the poitn of view of their grandchil - dren the meaning of grandparents has to be determined by individual decisions and choices” (ibid., p. 12)