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

Epistemology of communication, neomaterialism, and digital culture 89 munication as an associative process, the result of this radical mediation, understanding the social beyond interpersonal rela- tionships, going beyond exchanges “between human conscienc- es” (MARTINO, 2001). The social is the result of associations in this collective of humans and non-humans. Communication is, thus, an associative process, the result of radical mediation. With this emphasis, we can think, in a more complete and integrated way, about how humans are acted and act within the associa- tive processes without removing from the equation fundamen- tal agents for the understanding of these processes (the objects and their materialities) (LATOUR, 2015). The comprehension of action, mediation, and communication takes place, in this per- spective, from immanent analyzes, describing the action of all actors involved in (radical) mediation in a flat analysis, without resorting a priori to contextual or global explanations, on the one hand, or microsocial and anthropocentric, on the other. Returning, then, to the differences concerning media- tization, we can say that the neomaterialist view defends an op- posite epistemological stance. Mediatization is understood as a structural process of media influence (mass culture and commu- nication control). Couldry and Hepp (2017) identify the action of new digital media as deep mediatization . Mediation studies are dedicated to “the impact of the media in specific communi - cative situations situated in time and space” (HJARVARD, 2015, p. 53) and those of mediatization to understand “the long-term structural change in the role of the media in society and contem- porary culture” (ibid., p. 53). For Hjarvard, mediation refers to “specific communicative situations” and mediatization to “struc- tural changes in society”: Recent international discussions point to the resolution of these terminological disagreements in favor of the continental European distinction between 'mediatization' (denoting the long-term structural dimension) and 'mediation' (meaning the use of the media in communicative meetings) […]. The media co-structures communication and interaction (that is, the level of mediation), but mediatization occurs through the institutionaliza- tion of particular interaction patterns (formal and