Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Between the power of enunciators and the power of discourses... 225 we all access them through an interface. As Manovich (2006 [2001]) says: The interface shapes the way the user conceives the computer itself. And it also determines how he/she thinks about any media object that he/she accesses through the computer. By stripping the different media of their original differences, the interface imposes its logic on them (p. 113). 9 Our position at this point is: a) that the previous mass media system, with its lan- guages and dispositifs , has been transformed in many aspects, but has not disappeared , b) that indexicality has become weak, even as lateral knowledge, and its spectator subject has lost inno- cence (CARLÓN, 2016) but it persists, and its activ - ity is so important to understand contemporary dis- courses like knowing about the digital 10 , c) that it is necessary to investigate contemporary im- ages within the framework of a conceptualization that contemplates the simultaneous operation of two systems, that is, a more complex scenario. 9 This is the problem of generalist approaches. As with digitization, the impor - tance of interfaces should not reduce analytical tooling, because we need them to account for complexity. In our era, the mass media continue to work, in many aspects, based on phenomena that were conceptualized with categories such as dispositifs, languages, media, and so on. Although the cameras are digital, live television remains strongly iconic-indexical. Neither it is an interface: its spectator subject is basically the historical one, a media witness of the events (CARLÓN, 2004). Cinema in theaters, which is in crisis but has not disappeared, is not either: films that rely on recent transmedia narratives such as Toy Story 4, for example, heavily rely on a set of long-standing montage operations in their discursiveness tradition, like the sequence, and although its spectator subject is not that of old Disney films, many aspects persist: identification with the cam - era, non-interactive texts for more than two hours, spectator subject whose po - sition is defined by the text, etc. Ultimately, it is about not simplifying, because one of the reasons why the increase in complexity dominates in the history of mediatization is because the devices for the production of meaning accumulate rather than disappear. 10 A quick example: selfies. They are digital photographs, which circulate through interfaces, but it is impossible to understand them if we do not understand the importance of the iconic-indexical dimension in them.