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

Among Media: The place of mediatization 265 […] the most difficult is not the information, but the communication. The Internet is but an auto- mated information system; one way or another, it is men and collectives who integrate these flows of information into their communications. Informa- tion is always a segment, and only communication, with its prodigious ambiguities, gives it meaning. (WOLTON, 2008, p. 149) The quote seems to state that information is merely content transmitted by communication, hence the difference and, above all, the difficulty established in the transition from information to communication, which, understood as prodigious ambiguity , would transform meaning into information. It is nec- essary to emphasize the cognitive and conceptual distance that establishes between information - understood as a technically transmitted content and the other one that indicates the pro- cess of informational production that, in an entropic develop- ment, supposes the organization of information as a constitu- tive element of cultural environments. The need to consider the media environment, which derives from the interface between the organization and technical and human agents, is fundamen- tal to situate the territory of a media ecology where information and communication, subject and object, message, and content, meaning and the production of meaning meet. Undoubtedly, an extraordinary process that generates ambiguities is due to the traditional conceptual reduction that confuses information and communication while trying to dis- tance itself from the difficulty of processing the transition be - tween them. It seems appropriate to go past the concept of in- formation as transmitted content or simple quantitative data to achieve the interface established between information and com- munication, which, unanticipated, may not be ambiguous but ambivalent since both act together and generate the media dif- ference that produces the distinction between transmission and production of meaning, by establishing communicative bonds between men, men and techniques, means and ends. Would we have reached the need to understand how we could define mediatization?