Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Digital social networks and relation systems 249 mentalist refusals, in contrast to identifications by a composite line that embraces differential aspects among participants. VII – The proposal The preceding propositions, apparently apocalyptical 4 in tone, only brings together some generalized perceptions, in common sense and the academy, on problems happening in the society in mediatization with the expansion of digital networks. We do not intend to “explain” the networks based on this list, just illustrate the challenges. In opposite, we want to relate this framework to analytical perspectives and reflected knowledge production. The challenges indicate, facing the interactive dynamics of digital mediatization, that we find ourselves in a situation of lack of stabilized operational patterns to deal with its potentiali- ties. There are no previous interactional arrangements or attested modes of use in such dynamics. Strictly speaking although, real- izing the potentialities, we don’t know very well what to do with it, how to do it. The stabilized arrangements, which appear as more or less established interactional devices, socially shared, culturally available, instituted, do not offer answers or are directly shaken by those potentialities – of technological resources and of the social experiments made with them. The macro social problem that manifests, therefore, is this: society does not have articulated arrangements in histori- cal interactions, in the game of negotiations between social par- ticipants, of agreements, of existing power relations, to direct its interactional processes with minimal precision of any order, in the circumstances resulting from mediatization. This is a core communicational concern for digital con- temporaneity. Its first aspect is that, at the game of re-articula - tions, the more established systems of relations do not handle the urgencies as they did in preceding situations. 4 It is no longer a matter of the twin notions suggested by Umberto Eco’s work – dualism, in which the author warns us about in the introduction of the work that sustains this title (ECO, 1984, p. 11). Rather, digital networks involve a complex issue of challenges – potentialities and tangled risks.