Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

José Luiz Braga 250 Strategies for interaction, in society, work in counter- point to challenges and objectives. In parallel, social experi - ments are developed only partially guided by the established logics – social institutions, themselves, maintaining and seeking to adjust their more anchored rules, are also the field and source of experimentation. That is why the institutional views on medi- atization do not allow grasping the complete frame – the empha- sis on the institution creates a blind spot for the non-instituted. The codes that, in contemporary mediatization, are at the basis of social interaction and human communication are ev- idenced, above all, by one of two characteristics: they are codes incorporated in culture, but they no longer work as well in the diversity of circumstances, or they are codes in construction and have not yet stabilized their procedures and effectiveness, their own logics. They have not yet elaborated on the discourse that expresses and justifies its truth to the point that it can be acti - vated as if it were its origin (for this relation between practical logics and justifying discourse, see BRAGA, 2018, p. 6). In this situation, the communicational issue is not lim- ited to the activation of codes, and the daily inferential work of adjusting them to the singularity of the episodes. It extends to the insistent process of experimental code construction that takes place through the tentative exercise per se, as work in progress. This means that social communication – and here we must focus on mediatization, especially on digital social net- works – emphatically requires inferential work, social inven- tion, the experimental production of interactive arrangements (BRAGA, 2018) based on social practice. Unlike other historical moments, in which specialized fields (or in an accelerated process of specialization) generated their codes of interaction within their spheres of sectorized sys- tems of relations, there seems to be a dispersive generalization of the inventive process. Assuredly, with a diversity that fosters creativity, expansion, and diversification of origins for initia - tives, but also with an apparently uncontrollable dispersion. Then, this seems to be the central issue under study – not the logics of social networks, their most visible code element (as are the material logics of the technologies put in place) – but the experimentations undertaken in society. Moreover, it is from