Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Foreword 19 tion no longer describes the essentials of our time. On the other hand, Gomes asks, as an answer to the first question, if we do not, paradoxically, see the threshold of a new form of mediatiza- tion, whose meaning and scope we are not yet able to predict. The other set of chapters, as I said, is the application of the idea of mediatization to a specific scope of problems or at - tempts to theorize new sets of phenomena, based on the prem- ises based on mediatization studies. The chapters of Rita Figueiras, Mario Carlón, and Mag- ali Cunha bring problems of politics as problems of mediatiza- tion. Fausto Neto and Figueiras also consider mediatization in the light of journalism – or journalism in the light of mediatiza- tion. Ilya Kiriya, in turn, deals with the mediatization industries, mapping them as creative and education industries. Ana Paula da Rosa, and, again, Carlón think about the statutes of images circulating in digital environments in light of the premises of mediatization, while José Luiz Braga and Jairo Getúlio Ferreira frontally face the problems of digital communications. Figueiras’ chapter brings us empirical research, with a robust theoretical foundation, on the political commentary in the prime time of Portuguese television as a case of media coverage of politics. The empirical universe includes the years 2000 to 2015, in which the author examines hypotheses about levels and nature of the interaction between politics and jour - nalism through political commentary, it is understood by her as a privileged locus for examining the relationship between the media and politics. Figueiras is careful to tell us clearly which elements make up her operational concept of mediatization, which boils down to two premises: that the power relationship between the media and politics consists in the predominance of one field over the other; that the predominance has resulted in a domain of the specific logics of the media, with the consequent reconfiguration of the political sphere. Moreover, it is a matter of testing the background hypothesis of media interventionism , by analyzing the profiles of commentators with fixed space in TV journalistic products, from a longitudinal perspective. Antônio Fausto Neto, on the other hand, brings us an essay on the theme of the circulation of journalistic discourse,