Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Mario Carlón 224 tosensitive plate). In other words, images cannot be studied in themselves, but they must be framed in a study of mediatization and circulation 8 . B. New media system, interface, and digitization Now, how to address the study of contemporary images, the ones that the new mediatization produces and appropriates with all their complexity? The main novelty that contemporane- ity has brought is the emergence of a new media system based on telephone networks and the Internet. This system has been conceptualized mainly through concepts such as interface and digitization. The theories of interfaces have made substantial contributions to the understanding of the central phenomenon of this era that differentiates our experience with the historical media, languages, and dispositifs of the mass media era: inter- action (SCOLARI, 2018). The system of social media networks is interactive, while historical television, the cinema, and the newspaper, for example, are not. Digitization, in turn, has affect- ed the life of images on two key-levels, as demonstrated in the debates on the “end” of mass media (CARLÓN; SCOLARI, 2009): discursiveness, either by the generation of digital images or the digitization of canonical images and circulation, preventing in- stitutions from controlling and monetizing, as they did before, all the stages in which contact with them can be made in the social life (CARLÓN, 2016). However, while we consider it essential to add these conceptualizations, we understand that it is necessary to take a certain distance from the generalist developments of these theories: especially when they tend to reduce analytical tools by building a flat scenario of mediatization , in which, for example, the specificity of the iconic-indexical images of the modern and post-modern era that still circulate in post-modernity tends to disappear with the argument that they can be digitized or that 8 Remember here that, for Jean-Marie Schaeffer, the photographic image is a re- ception sign. She says: “[…] I affirm that it is impossible to fully understand it within the framework of a semiology that defines the sign from the point of view of its emission” (1990 [1987], p. 7-8). This perspective has points of contact with the formulations on the difference between production and recognition by Eliseo Verón, for whom the subject in production is a passage point of meaning.