Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Mario Carlón 226 C. Modern, post-modern, and contemporary images From what we said, I freely return here to previously formulated proposals regarding modern and post-modern im- ages, based on an analysis of the functioning of the media and circulation systems. Within the case we are analyzing, the inter- est of this distinction is that it is useful to determine the specific - ity of the images that circulated. Images that we consider modern are those that the me- dia system installed between the nineteenth and twentieth cen- turies, and thus differentiated from the pre-media through the installation of iconic-indexical dispositifs : the photographic, the cinematographic, and the direct television. They circulated with a big difference between production and recognition and were characterized by their autonomy. Those ones we considered post-modern were born on the margins of the media discourses of modernity, mainly in the field of avant-garde artistic experimentation, and devel - oped a series of specific operations: appropriation, montage, intervention, inter-discursiveness, etc. These images expanded in the field of art in post-modern photography, and then into the mass media, becoming one of its most important develop- ments. The big difference between production and recognition is maintained. Contemporary images arise right after the emergence of the Internet; they are digital and accessed mainly through in- terfaces. Thanks to the interfaces and interaction, the distance between production/recognition processes (not their con - ceptual difference) decreases and acquires a dynamic rhythm. Contemporary circulation has specific characteristics: it is in - tra-systemic (in a media system) or inter-systemic (establishes between two media systems, that of the mass media and that of social media networks), and in both cases, they circulate imag- es with modern, post-modern, and contemporary components (modern and post-modern ones with weak indexicality), and their pace can be frenetic. We now will return to the analysis of the case “ Los zócalos de CFK.”