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

Luís Mauro Sá Martino 38 1. Introduction I usually say something that I am fully responsible for, although I understand that it can be controver- sial: in recent years I have learned more didactics by watching television series than by reading spe- cific books (Mariana MAGGIO, 2018, p. 57). In a provocative text written in 1969, “Mutations 1990”, about how the education would be in the “future”, or the distant year of 1989, McLuhan (1969) attracted various criticisms for indicating the various problems of the traditional teaching mod- el, based, above all, on print culture. He indicated the necessity of changes in the teaching concept to deal with people born and raised in a media environment of a completely different nature, characterized, above all, by audiovisual media - “electronic” in the time’s terms. The Canadian author was not only referring to television, cinema, or radio. In Mutations 1990, McLuhan (1969, p. 49) states literally: “A worldwide network of computers will, in a few minutes, make accessible to the students all kinds of knowledge of the entire world. The problem was not the media itself, but the way culture, the human uses of these media, were distant from the school as if the school model was refractory to the aesthetic- cognitive conditions resulting from the appropriation of these means, says Lima (1989). Thinking about the relations between media and teaching indicates, among other things, the need to understand them in their articulations, strains, and complexities, avoiding reducing or binary interpretations that sometimes come up when the subject is discussed. This essay outlines some aspects of the relationship between the digital media environment and the teaching-learning spaces, in the perspective of a mediatiza- tion theory (MARTINO, 2019a; 2019b), from three points: (1) thinking, beyond the “technology”, the tool, but the “technique”, human capacity to do and create; (2) the learning processes are, in their multiplicity, linked to the cognitive habits of the learner; (3) learning is articulated, in many ways, with the contemporary