Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Foreword 17 encing distinct social meanings. The very idea of generation, in some way, is linked to the idea of media self-awareness, that is, the self-awareness of the media that were present in their lives in different phases, and the social uses that were made of them. In turn, Muniz Sodré, the doyen of researchers in com- munication in Brazil, brings an essay on the fortunes and misfor- tunes of the mediating function of journalism over time, since its emergence as an organ of the modern, illuminist, and the repub- lican public sphere, to its more complete transformation before the digitization and datification of information flows in the 21st century. In his short and sophisticated essay, Muniz Sodré takes us to visit the arc of time that goes from the moment when in- formation mediated public deliberation and civil conversation, in its origins, until this moment of accelerated and horizontal in- formation flows, but not for that reason exempt from processes of fabrication of narratives and hidden agendas. That, let us be realistic, is the moment when a society, paradoxically, languish- es due to hunger for quality information at the same time that it is replete with disinformation, mistakes, and manipulations distributed digitally and through algorithms out of control of society. Vera França, on the other hand, faithful to the research interest she has been supporting for some years, in the episte- mology of the field of communication in Brazil, examines and outlines the history of the idea of mediatization in Brazil, South America, and Europe. França tells us the adventures through which the concept and its verbal forms are sculpted among us, by the hands of intellectual artisans such as Santaella, Muniz Sodré, José Luiz Braga, Fausto Neto, and Pedro Gilberto Gomes, only then to finish with the advances of the concept in the the - ories carried out by European authors (like Couldry), mainly those from Central and Northern Europe (like Hjarvard, Krotz, Hepp, Strömbäck, and Bolin). In an ongoing act, França theoretically reconstructs a synoptic picture of the use of the concept of mediatization, across the various authors and traditions, with three possibili- ties: use as a general and descriptive concept, in which media- tization generally refers to the extent and “strength of the pres- ence” of communication technologies in society; a mediatization