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

Epistemology of communication, neomaterialism, and digital culture 91 The neomaterialist perspective, applied to the stud- ies of digital communication, asks how algorithms, interfaces, devices, laws, regulations, patents, communication networks, spaces of use, etcetera, build a particular phenomenon. It pre- vents us from leaving these elements aside in discourses that seem to say they recognize the hybrids, technique, media, but that do not devote time and attention to describing and analyz- ing how these objects affect humans and the resulting relation- ships. In this case, we lose the vision of entanglement, reducing the phenomenon to the context, the interpretation, or the struc- ture above or below the human - “mediations and mediatiza- tion.” If Martín-Barbero (1997) stated that we should go “from the media to mediatization,” perhaps, now, we should take the opposite direction. Therefore, anthropocentric postures, contextual or fo- cused on infrastructure, on the one hand, or micro-interactions (between humans), on the other, do not help to understand the main emerging controversies, such as the new infocommuni- cational objects. The network formed in the dispute should get described and analyzed to identify the forms of agency of the elements at stake, highlighting their material, non-essentialist, local characteristics. The algorithm of contemporaneous digi- tal platforms is not a black box, as it is possible to understand not what it is (in essence), but pragmatically its agency, what it does-do (BUCHER, 2018). To map, identify, and analyze the actions in this associative communication means to exercise a more myopic position, less concerned with cultural or social generalizations. A neomaterialist approach allows us to escape the dichotomy established by social communication towards an associative communication, recognizing the particularity of radical mediation. From a material and pragmatic perspective, it is in- teresting to know what types of interfaces, laws, spaces, insti- tutions, instruments, patents, technical documents, algorith- mic agency, records, and other material elements intertwining produce the problem to be investigated. We must ask ourselves how the network is settled, and how it acts, how material com- ponents enter into mediation, and how the result is made in the production of this interlacing, identifying immanent affecta-