Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Ana Paula da Rosa 196 it presents an expansion of its importance in the communica- tional phenomenon, especially through the advent of networks and the web. This is because the logics or grammars of produc- tion and recognition (VERÓN, 2004) intersect, having ascent and descent orders, what we did not see so intensely until the mid-90’s 3 . With it, the space (temporal and of action) between production and recognition, named for many years as a kind of interval or hiatus, becomes an operating instance of communi- cation, since meaning is effectively produced not by one or an- other link in the process, but in dispute, in contact. When we express circulation as space, we do not refer to the media, although circulation has precisely its visible tip on the media dispositifs. But to recover circulation, it is neces- sary to go deeper than simply identifying what emerges; it is necessary to recover the traces. In this regard, the notion of cir- culation used here is focused on this invisible moment, which can be reconstituted by the traces of materiality and which al- lows us to understand the dynamics of meaning. In terms of images, this demands to observe their insertions and absences in multiple dispositifs, from multiple “actors.” We understand that images, in the context of mediatization, are produced and designed for circulation; that is, there is no such thing as be- ing run over, a social action, an attack that would not be trans- formed into a media event, and an image. We have reached the point of having terrorist attacks being broadcast on Facebook or robberies filmed by the injured victims themselves, which indicates that the image is not a record, but it is the condensa- tion of the world, the visual metaphor of what we are unable to translate. Nonetheless, the images that are put into circula- tion, produced to give visibility and to be visible, are not always the ones produced by those who put them in the flow (BRAGA, 2012); quite often, on the contrary, they are the result of ap- propriations, reworkings, and reinterpretations. Such move- ments imply new meanings in progress or the maintenance of 3 It is important to say that circulation is an intrinsic part of the communicational process. However, when we demarcate its intensification from the 90s, we are reiterating the place of access to the digital ambiance, which Verón (2013) high- lighted as an intensification of the complexity of the process of producing mean - ing and its derived clashes.