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

Epistemology of communication, neomaterialism, and digital culture 93 It is necessary to start from immanent analyzes of documents, concrete practices, forms of discourse, places to identify and de- scribe the elements in mediation, and the forms of affectation (transduction) in the constitution of the dispute. Humans are not in a privileged place in the circulation of action and should give importance to the material elements and objects in question. In summary, the methodology starts from the material- ist assumptions - it is recognized that everything has a material effect and exists through material agencies - and non-essential- ist (pragmatic) assumption s - things have no essences and are what they do and what they make-to-do. These assumptions are aligned with radical empiricism to locate affectations on the identified problems. Everything gets defined in processes and material movements in which each new problem calls for new associative force/power relationships: everything that exists does so in relation, needs to pass through others to continue its journey of subsistence. Association is radical mediation - trans- lation, transduction, agency, intertwining, etcetera - involving humans and non-humans. Without mediation, there is nothing. It must be observed in a flat, local, and non-anthropocentric to- pology - the analyzes must be made considering multiple agents, under pain of purifying the relationships and impoverishing the descriptions of the phenomena and identification of action flows. Humans do not always have the primacy of action. The aim here is to go beyond cultural, contextual, hermeneutic perspectives. On this last principle, I have identified four ideal types that appear, in general, in research, texts, and lectures with an anthropocentric bias 6 on communication or digital media (Maia, Object-Washing, Panopticon, and Ouroboros), which I describe below. Maia: Texts that jump to generalizations without ap- peal to empiricism. The material world is an illusion. Visions 6 Ongoing research at POSCOM/Lab404 is applying these standard ideals to aid in the discussion on the hypothesis raised here: my research “Communication, mediation and cyberculture” (PQ / CNPq) and that of Professor Elias Bitencourt (“Communication, performativity algorithms, and digital platforms. Neomateri- alist investigations about communicational experiences mediated by algorithms in the era of data capitalism”). Indication of such standard ideals is intended to aid the visualizing of the general argument of the text and is not intended to be a form of depreciation of the authors involved.