Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Foreword 15 cific social capital and productive routines and deontologies of their own; there are various logics (or grammars or any other expression which denotes systematic modes, tested models and taught and learned patterns of meaning production) at work in the fields of communication. But communication as a social fact, as meanings slipping from transmitters to receivers, as flows of content – to use this term in vogue in the digital environment – is politics, culture, entertainment, sociability, commerce. Political communication, for example, is not the com- bination of politics and communication; it is communication in which political content travels, in which political content is gen- erated, disputed, transformed into a weapon, in frames, in agen- das, in information, in fake news, in clarification, in conspiracy theories, in reports of facts and mistakes and manipulations. There is no way to unravel communication and politics in politi- cal communication, as there is probably no way to make dialysis between communication and sociability or culture. So, if media coverage is precisely the condition that creates a phenomenon like political, cultural, commercial com- munication, etcetera , after all, mediatization and communica- tion will end up being the same thing. It may even make sense to support this thesis, but are we ready for this conversation? Another risk is the epistemological imperialism. I re- member that Umberto Eco used exactly this expression in the early 1970s, when he published his Trattato di semiotica gene- rale , warning of the risk that this would represent for the dis- cipline. It is clear that no one listened to him, and semiotics became, effectively, an imperialist discipline, advancing and an- nexing all the territories in which it was able to get its hands on, until it disappeared, paradoxically, “by excess” (but do not tell it to the remaining semioticians because they are still reluctant to record the fact). If mediatization is a super concept, it would hardly resist the allure of transforming itself into a formula that deciphers everything, breaks all codes, and invades all systems, explaining everything better than any other alternative. It is hy- perbole, fear not, if it had pretensions or imperialist reach, the field of mediation would not be here struggling with polysemy and trying to build painful consensus. But it is also a mental ex-