Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Ada C. Machado da Silveira 170 By questioning the performance of the global media, or a globally active media, as occurs with digital commercial platforms, if understood as shapers of a media polis, a common space for political and social communication, we understand that they would act by establishing the foundations of the social relations both within national communities and among neigh- boring and foreign societies, structuring the globalized circula- tion of information. We highlight, in another aspect, the position of Roger Silverstone (2010) on media culture, in which mediatization is characterized as “the fundamentally, but unevenly, dialectical process in which institutionalized media of communication are involved in the general circulation of symbols in social life” (SIL- VERSTONE, 2010, p. 168). The late British author pointed out the performative character of the media culture when he said: [that] Media culture could be […] defined as late modernity’s space of appearance, both in the sense of where the world appears, and in the sense of ap- pearance as such constituting that world. (SILVER- STONE, 2010, p.51). 3 Mediatization is taken here as a social process full of everyday life, affected by the material relationship that subjects have with technologies. Its conception recognizes what Brazil- ian communication researchers have accustomed to denominate media, that is, a set of devices of different origin and complexity. The social context, entwined in media culture, invests in semi- otic perceptions that, according to the Eliseo Verón’s judgment (2014), produce the elements that characterize mediatization. Continuing in the institutionalized perspective of me- diatization through the study of professional media, especially the journalistic activity of producing news, I pursue the purpose of recognizing what is mediatized in a mediatization process that involves the so-called peripheries. For this, a digression is necessary. 3 In the original: “ Se podría definir la cultura de los medios [...] como el espacio de aparición en la modernidad tardía, no sólo en el sentido de lugar en el que el mun - do aparece, sino también en el sentido de que la aparición (el hecho de aparecer) como tal constituye ese mundo ” (SILVERSTONE, 2010, p. 51).