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

José Luiz Braga 290 tiplicity of differential aspects that characterize them. This per- ception enables diversified and flexible interactions in the social environm W en h t e . n differences are organized with larger variation, they favor arrangements and compositions in which divergenc- es can be diluted, offering ways to avoid the emphatic confronta- tion of positions. But if the plural fades into binarism, and the di- versity of positions is subjected to a double artificial alternative, intolerance prevails, and polarization becomes constitutive and defining of the very profile of differences. If opposing binarism is a necessary condition for polarized development, it does not seem to be sufficient for its implementation. Also, part of this organization of things is an over-emphasis of difference, in an excluding binary format. In polarizing situations, the other, defined at the oppo - site pole, is seen exclusively by the characteristic that makes it to be classified as different. Reduced to this unique dimension, all the indicators that would put it in a space of plurality, allow- ing interactions, are deleted. The only link between the poles be- comes the axis of the excluding difference. The reducing entity itself is self-limiting: “ my position”. The world is now made up of a binary classifying process, “we” versus opponents, no longer simply by finding disagreement, but by reducing both poles to the single dimension of a radical- ized difference. At the same time, all inferential efforts to adjust the shared codes to the concrete situation disappear, which could turn to conjuncture reworkings of interpretations, of consider- ations that, in the interactional process of human communica- tions, complete the codes, allowing their efficient activation. The examples are easy to realize: everyone who, to- day, disagrees, in the country, with an attitude contradictorily called “liberal” is immediately categorized into a polarizing code - “communists”. The same type of structure acts on racism and homopho T b h ia e . polarized situations are, therefore, in a zone of risk of rupture. Here, another negative quality appears, to which those attitudes and behaviors of intolerance, Apparatus, and ha- tred refer. The search for common action between differences