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

Among Media: The place of mediatization 269 tion. It is the cultural and social interpretation of information planes that count, not the volume or diversity of such information… That is why, at some point, it is advisable that the Internet user aban- dons mediatized communication and confronts natural social human communication. Hence the importance of contacts, voice, looks, beyond the mere exchange of signals. Beware of interactive loneliness! (WOLTON, 2008, p. 150) As mentioned in the previous section, the citation clari- fies the difference between the two technological dimensions, but, above all, stresses that mediatization does not only refer to the use of the network or devices provided by technological capi- tal; on the contrary, mediatization is more directly linked to the environmentally organized territory through the exchange and evolution of human mind and values. Information and the con- sequences provided by technology are mediatized, but not the technologies themselves. The mediatization provided by the organization and dissemination of information requires the reinvention of human values and relations capable of redirect technical systems, leading them to consider that, although planetary, the network connects cultural, social, linguistic, and productive differences that make heterogeneous something that technically presents itself as homo- geneous. Mediatization uses technical resources, but its informa- tional characteristic comprises of multiple differences. We live on a technologically connected, but multiple and diverse, planet; so, mediatization does not refer to the technological world in which we live, and fromwhich it seems we are not willing to escape, but it refers to howwe can reinvent the world and human relations, and this is an eminently political program, of which contemporary me- dialogy is directly aware. Though technologically mediated, there is not a mediatized project that does not contemplate the differ- ences and multiplicities which constitute the only possibility of re- invention worthy of the ability of man to generate information and produce affections. The seemingly homogeneous territory of me- diatization gets altered, and so does the place for human relations.