Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Vera V. França 26 [...] we must not fall into the misconception that cultural transformations are due only to the ad- vent of new technologies and new means of com- munication and culture. Rather, they are the types of signs that circulate in these media, the types of messages and communication processes that are engendered in them, which are truly responsible not only for shaping the thinking and sensitivity of human beings , but also for promoting the emer- gence of new socio-cultural environments (ibid., p. 22; emphasis added). Santaella does not use the term “mediatization”, but it is this context of techno-communicative and cultural changes that the author emphasizes when naming this sixth era – the era of digital culture. But it is Muniz Sodré, without a doubt, who brought both expression (mediatization 3 ) and its most definitive theo - retical foundations, in his book Anthropological Mirror (2002), establishing the mediation/ mediatization distinction, rescuing the concept of medium as a theoretical and also naming a new era, not only cultural, but existential – the fourth bios . If media- tion means “to bridge or make two parties communicate… due to an original power to discriminate, to make distinctions, there- fore a symbolic place” (SODRÉ, 2006, p. 20), mediatization com- prehends “an order of socially realized mediations – a particular type of interaction, therefore, that we could call techno-media- tions – characterized by a kind of technological and marketing prosthesis of the sensitive reality, called medium” (ibid.). The concept of medium goes beyond the technical de- vice – it is the channeling and ambiance structured with its codes, it is “the communicational flow, coupled with a technical device [...] socially produced by the capitalist market” (SODRÉ, 2002, p. 20). The channeling produced by the medium – which is not a simple channel – has the potential to transform the lived reality; it is a “conditioning form of the lived experience, with 3 In an interview (2010), Sodré recalls that he was the introducer of the concept in Brazil, starting with Eliseo Verón (mediatization). See http://www.ciseco. org.br/index.php/noticias/entrevistas/48-muniz-sodre-midiatizacao-como- o-acabamento-de-outro-chao.