Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Jairo Ferreira 258 Watzlawick et alii (1972) as a reference for media communica - tion must be questioned, in our perspective, by the interposi- tions of material means. There is something here to be deci- phered. The authors say: We want, therefore, to accentuate less the rela- tions of the sender (and the receiver) and the sign, and more the relation that unites the sender and receiver, when it is mediatized by communication (WATZLAWICK et alii, 1972, p. 17). We know that this union (“that unites”), in the authors’ perspective, is not reified. Their investigation of pathogenesis through the observation of interactions (in languages they call analog and digital) does not allow us to say that, in their per- spectives, communication would be an idyllic whole. But there is a problem here that calls us to the contradictory. When con- sidering that the sign, whether analog or digital, allows access to pathogenesis, there is a risk of reducing the sign to a transpar- ent and passive place in the interaction. An interaction, there- fore, seen without considering the semiosis that is visited by the theories of the sign. Thus, we propose that the interposition of the sign transform interactions, just as the coronavirus, a mate- rial sign of nature, enters in synergy with nature and culture and transforms itself (mutations of the sign nature named corona). Media, signs, and techn logy When we talk about media, we are referring to social signs. We can consider that the cosmos, nature, and other living species (such as the corona sign), and animals are sign builders (by adaptive processes). However, we are specifically interested in the signs constructed by the species we call human. It is not our object, in this article, to differentiate this various semiosis (of cosmos, nature, and other species), but rather to specify the medium in its interposition between the sender and the receiver. In our perspective, what culture calls technologies are, above all, signs. It is a concept that we have developed for over a decade (FERREIRA, 2006). Only techno-ideology reduces media to technology. In the next section, when we formulate