Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Mario Carlón 228 subject has lost his/her innocence but that does not mean that it has disappeared. 12 On the other hand, it is relevant not to leave aside that this type of discussion was not born in the contemporary era, nor by the action of Facebook or any other social network: it is set, with its specificity, on characteristic debates of the era of massive media. In other words, the fear of these programs lies in the fact that they know that although the posting took place in a social network whose logic is the digitization and we have ac- cess to it via an interface, that image needs to be denied because it has a great capacity to influence others, not only the Kirchner - ists but anyone who comes into contact with it. Perhaps now it is better understood what we mean when we say that we distance ourselves from certain general developments in digitization the- ory: in particular, those that dissolve or “flatten” the differences between distinct images. E. Contemporary mediatization Let us move on to the concept of the new mediatiza- tion 13 since we have established our position on the theory of interfaces and digitization. The following graph, which places the mass media system at the top and the social media networks at the bottom, shows the articulation between media systems that enables the new circulation. In the contemporary scenario, both are dominated by digitization, but that does not imply that digitization is all-powerful: Santos Vargas’ image, as we saw, is not only digital. 12 A reflection on the symbolic, iconic, indexical and digital can be found in Carlón (2012). 13 The analysis presented here on mediatization and circulation has multiple contact points with those developed by authors such as Antonio Fausto Neto, José Luiz Braga, Jairo Ferreira, and Pedro Gilberto Gomes in dialogues between Argentina-Brazil. We redirect here to Carlón (2019).