Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Digital social networks and relation systems 245 previously generated, by the very attempted exer- cise of communication, whenever social urgencies (that is: problems that do not have canonical solu- tions) generate ad hoc arrangements for coping. In summary: social codes make communication devel- opment possible within its scope but, due to their tentative ar- rangements, it is the communicational process that generates social codes. The given codes (in fact, previously generated) are constantly modified not only by possible changes in context but also by their use. What is happening now is that we locate ourselves in a historic moment when the established codes see their relevance reduced, and the situations under experimentation have not yet generated new codes sufficiently stable or reliable in their predictability. V – What annoys us “Traditional” social networks – the systems of rela- tions that are very established in social practices that we may consider consolidated in culture and performed in politics, in educational systems, in several professional fields, in the insti - tutions of private life – are so diverse (among each other and the internal processes of each one) as the current digital networks and their processes are differentiated. Why does a range of diversities not bother us, and the recent space is intriguing? Probably because we discover, in the second situation, a degree of instability, of existence not consoli- dated nor “pacified” by the repetitive practice and the discourse of normality. In the systems of very established relations, we have “true codes” that indicate this normality and make up the ref- erence, both for the service and for the strategies of eventual detachment from the pattern 3 . What annoys us, in what is not yet established, seems to be this almost code absence, this experimental opening that 3 See, in this aspect, “From the rules to the strategies” (BOURDIEU, 2004).