Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Wilson Gomes 14 original fields need to reach society. There is no economy or culture without consumers, there is no politics without voters and public opinion, and public attention, audience, and visibility cannot be achieved at a significant level to get commodified in consumption, electoral decision, or support, for example, with- out communication. Besides, this space of the inter , the between , which ends up necessarily constituting itself, does not, under any cir- cumstances, consist in mere agglutination or juxtaposition, but in a chemical result in which the combined elements have cer- tainly already become something else. The word mediatization refers to the function that the elements of communication fulfill in social chemistry, when the resources and means of commu- nication, old and new, are combined with the elements of other social fields. But we also use that expression to designate what results from this combination, this new social form in which the elements of communication cannot be separated anymore and are a condition for its possibility of existing. Second, there is the problem of the extension of the concept of mediatization, that is, of the set of phenomena, in the world, to which it can be applied properly. By its very nature, the mediatization of social life cannot have a very limited extension, even if we isolate particular aspects in the application universe and talk about things like the mediatization of politics, culture, entertainment, or sociability. Each of these boundaries would still contain a universe of things. Several different phenomena are mediated and mediatized, which is why the extension of the concept must necessarily be comprehensive. On the other hand, if the epistemic boundaries are too broad, there are two risks. The first would be that ultimately the limits of mediatization would coincide, at least, with the limits of communication by traditional media and by digital means and environments. After all, when we say that there is a field of communication and a field of politics or culture, for example, we do not tell the whole truth, since communication does include a materiality of its own. There is a communication industry, with all the elements of a company under a capitalist regime; there are several professional fields of communication, with their spe -