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

From mediatization to deep mediatization 31 In times of deep mediatization, diverse collectivities consider that media and media infrastructures can be identified, themselves, as an object of engagement with the expectation that they might influence on processes of societal transformation. Examples of these collectivities for media change (COULDRY; HEPP, 2017, p. 180) can be seen in social movements such as the Open Data movement (BAACK, 2015), think tanks such as the Inter-American Dialogue (NEUBAUER, 2012), and pioneer com- munities such as the Maker Movement (DAVIS, 2017). As diverse as these collectivities may be, they share the conviction that me- dia are fundamental to contemporary societal formations, and much like actors from the worlds of politics and economics, they consider media and media infrastructures as an object within which political engagement can thrive. It is often the case that a change in the present gives us a different view of the past. This is the case with the idea of acting on media. While deep mediatization has directed our attention to this broader form of media-related practice, we find that once we adopt this point of view this has been a general phenomenon throughout media history and, in particular, a key characteristic of more recent digital media. We can even go so far as to write the history of digital media and their infrastructures as that of act- ing on media. Fred Turner (2006) presented an important draft for just such a perspective in his historical account of the history of Silicon Valley in, From Counterculture to Cyberculture . Through a detailed historical analysis, he demonstrated how the network that developed around theWhole Earth Catalogue, curated by Stu- art Brand, had a significant influence on the development of digi- tal technologies long before economists or politicians even gave them a moment’s thought. Examining it with the benefit of hind - sight, as a hybrid of social movement and think tank, the Whole Earth Network could be described as an early pioneer commu- nity (and later as a network of various pioneer communities). The point is that the Whole Earth Network was able to define itself by acting on media. After the countercultural utopias had failed, the network turned to digital media technology as a means of shaping society according to its ideas and values. Remarkably, we can at- tribute many media-related social movements, such as the hacker movement, directly to the Whole Earth Network (LEVY, 1984),