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

André Lemos 92 tions, focusing on the problem locally, without calling on tran- scendent notions, paying the price of connections, recognizing powers and power relationships within the experience (LEMOS, 2018). Power and inequalities are produced within networks/ assemblages, they tend to encapsulate, but we cannot freeze or transfer one analysis to another, under pain of losing the radical localized and moving mediation, which we recognize as these stabilizations. Ronaldo Lemos (2019) wrote an article in Folha de S. Paulo stating that there is no public opinion on social networks because of bots, algorithms, interfaces. It is assumed that the public and its opinion would not be produced but rather un- veiled by neutral instruments. Marres (2012), for example, will show, from the concept of material participation, the role of objects in the forms of mobilization and political engagement. The same in the public’s production (LIPPMANN, 2007) or its opinion (TARDE, 2007). From a neomaterialist perspective, the issue is how artifacts make emerge (produce) the public and its opinion, as they now appear in this algorithmic socio-technical system (different from their production by agora, piazza, press, radio, TV, etcetera). More interesting than knowing what the public and its opinion (in essence) are, it is to see in what condi- tions of the agency they are built, discussed, disseminated. It is the non-essentialist, pragmatic, immanent, associative, and non- anthropocentric perspective. 3. Neomaterialist methodology of associative communication We propose, next, a neomaterialist methodology to be applied to the products and processes of communication in gen- eral, and of digital culture, in particular. This method was based on the epistemological perspective presented above, insisting on pointing out the radical mediations in the processes of associa- tive communication. The assumption is that we must recognize that no element has essential attributes and that they are only defined in their relationships, in the assemblages, in the lines of escape, in the affections, in the radical mediations, therefore.