Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Wilson Gomes 16 periment on what can happen with concepts that have difficulty limiting their intension. In this book, we have a collection, bravely captained by Jairo Getúlio Ferreira, of contributions by great experts on the topic of mediatization, combined between theoretical and grounding approaches, on the one hand, and applications; with possible combinations of the two efforts. Just as there are chap- ters with cartographies of the media research itself (Vera França and Pedro G. Gomes), or reviews of applications to a specific field (Magali Cunha, Fausto Neto), there are also articles that explore new perspectives or, at least, point out directions and challenges for future research (José L. Braga, Jairo G. Ferreira). Among those who, in some way, conceptually or his- torically organize the field of media coverage are the chapters of Göran Bolin and Muniz Sodré, on the one hand, and those of Vera França and Pedro Gilberto Gomes, on the other. Almost all applied works, however, to a greater degree (such as Ilya Kiriya, Antônio Fausto Neto, and Jairo Getúlio Ferreira), to a lesser de- gree, devote some space to conceptual clarification or to make some recognition of the field, which seems to reflect the perma - nent need for this theoretical and methodological approach to substantiate, define, and justify its object. Professor Göran Bolin offers us an exemplary case of this attitude. In his chapter, he presents a consistent approach to the phenomenon of mediatization, adopting as an analytical cor- pus the recording and examination of experiences and memo- ries of the uses of media in different generations. After offering a map of the conceptual alternatives typical of the field of study of mediatization for the investigation of its object (the institution - alist perspective, the technological approach, and the culturalist point of view), and adopting the third one, and after mapping the frequent ways of looking at human generations, the author pres- ents some elements for a phenomenological and generational approach to the social use of the media. If the scholar takes a cross-sectional sample of a historical moment, he believes it will result that different generations coexist, synchronously, with the same cultural artifacts of communication, but, diachronically, the trajectories of their generational life has dealt with differ - ent artifacts, through different cultural experiences, and experi-