Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Wilson Gomes 18 usage to talk about the communicational transformation of a world in which communication modifies thoughts, sensibilities, and relationships; an approach that accepts the communication- al transformation of reality, but seeks to capture this change in specific practices, such as politics or science. The author still has enough conceptual energy to clean up the house, that is, the tensions between the concept of me- diation and the conceptual formulas that seem to belong to the same family of issues: cultural industry, mediasphere, media theory, and mediation. Finally, the author presents problems and perspectives for a future agenda for mediatization studies, insisting that, if, on the one hand, the expression “mediatization coverage” is essential, the study of the phenomenon, on the oth- er hand, is fruitful and relevant. Lastly, Pedro Gilberto Gomes’ chapter closes the theo- retical foundation quadrant, which sustains the same ambition of the Minas Gerais author for the cartography of the scientific discussion on mediatization. The starting point he adopts treats the concept as polysemic (or plurivocal , as he prefers), since both the meanings and their reference may vary according to the reality and the interest of those who use it. In the taxonomy employed by Pedro G. Gomes, everything depends on how much of the media is seen in the phenomena that maintain signifi - cant intersection with it, so that, for some, there is mediatiza- tion when simply the media is an intermediary cognitive sphere between politics, economics, the entertainment, etcetera, and people while, for others, there is proper intermediation when the media significantly change the very nature of other social spheres. Mediatization can, therefore, mean an interface, an am- biance, or a structural transformation of other spheres of social life, including sociability itself, as a result of communication. That established, he then summarizes the intellectual history of mediatization, until the conclusion with an examina- tion of a major issue, namely, whether the intense digitization of social life, which necessarily involves increasing levels of disin- termediation – that is, the awareness that traditional interme- diaries, such as journalism or television are no longer needed for communication flows – would not be a sign that mediatiza-