Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Magali do Nascimento Cunha 150 culturally inscribed in the public space and (re)-legitimize their public function (BURITY, 2016). With this, the personal and col- lective, informal, and institutionalized experience of religious practices is no longer kept at the private edges but also projected through the public space as a collective action, as culture, and as a discourse about values, configuring itself as a public religion. Public religion means taking religion beyond its insti- tutional and symbolic borders, allowing the other-religious and the non-religious to interact in the religious experience. The re- ligious go to the secular and the secular to the religious, in an exchange that sometimes leads to confrontations, sometimes to the formation of alliances previously unthinkable. This is an im- portant characteristic of public religion – having pervious, tra- versable, fluid borders. It is in this sense that we can affirm that the configura - tion of public religion among Brazilian evangelicals occurs in the context of the dynamics of the society in mediatization. Based on José Luiz Braga’s studies (2006), by mediatization, we refer to the interactional (sociability) processes that “take place in quite different ways, in specific societies,” and develop according to the logics of the media (BRAGA, 2006). The expression “in me- diatization” refers to the phenomenon as an ongoing process, a dynamic, not an element consolidated or determined by a single form of structuring. We also resort to Roger Silverstone in the understand- ing that mediatization is the fundamentally, but unevenly, dialec- tical process in which institutionalized media of communication are involved in the general circulation of symbols in social life” (1999, apud SILVERSTONE, 2006, p. 168-169). This notion is related to what Jesús Martín-Barbero explains when he refers to “communicational mediations in culture”: I invert my first map [the cultural mediations of communication] and propose the communicative mediations of culture, which are: ‘technicality’; the growing ‘institutionality’ in the media as social in- stitutions and not just apparatuses, institutions of economic, political, and cultural importance; ‘soci-