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

Mediatization and virtuality in human sciences: An announced crossroads 65 Habermas (2015), for whom the present time is the basis of a set of knowledge that gives rise to our current experience in the public political sphere. According to the author, modernity is characterized as a context that no longer receives “[...] guiding criteria for models from other eras” (ibid., p. 210). Otherwise, “[...] [it] sees itself exclusively placed on itself [...] [that is,] it has to extract its normativity from itself” (ibid., p. 210). As a result, the period establishes the protagonism of the present time as its currency. Between tradition and innovation, there would be the emergence of the present time as a result of the fusion of histo- ry and utopia , as well as from this synthesis, he says, at least since the French Revolution, our public sphere experience would live. According to the philosopher, in fact, it is necessary to recognize the crisis of utopian energies that arise from the intersection of two emancipatory movements: on the one hand, the “founda- tion of equally structured forms of life, which at the same time should free up spaces for action for self-realization individual and spontaneity” (ibid., p. 224); and, on the other, the possibili- ties for the “free citizen with equal rights, extended to the sphere of production, to be able to become the crystallizing core of au- tonomous life forms” (ibid., p. 226). In short, the crisis would be the model that envisioned linking prerogatives of social justice to the democratic rule of law. Such exhaustion, however, would not say so much about the total disappearance of utopias, but of those linked to the context of universal productivism . Utopias, according to him, are part of important conquests of cultural modernization, decisive for our political condition, and should not be confused with the type of social modernization that has prevailed until now. For this reason, the need to understand both the current neoliberal forms in the field of work and the differ - entiation of the processes of cultural and social modernization. To a large extent, then there would be the particular- ity of the time present in the epistemological scope. Created by cultural modernization, it locates precisely in the condition of passage, between possible breaks with the past and the sponta- neity of the future - a condition in which the presence of a type of virtuality that is intrinsic to it is observed; that is, the present time would belong to a type of negativity, an openness to the undetermined, in which things that “ are not yet ” become con-