Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Mediatization, communication, and algorithms: a theoretical-methodological proposal... 273 ship or love which lead to lasting relations, social- ly sanctioned or not. The social sense is guided by the system of mutually reinforcing and infinitely redundant signs of which each body is the bearer – clothing, pronunciation, bearing, posture, man- ners – and which, unconsciously registered, are the basis of ‘antipathies’ or ‘sympathi s’ ; the seemingly most immediate ‘ elective affinities’ are always partly base don the unconscious decipher- ing of expressive features, each of which only takes on its meaning and value within the system of its class variations (one only has t think of the way of laughing or smiling noted by ordinary language). Taste is what brings together things and people that go together . (BORDIEU, 1991, p. 238). This spontaneous decoding of one habitus by another is the basis of the immediate affinities which orient social encounters, discouraging so- cially discordant relationships, encouraging well- matched relationships, without these operations ever having to be formulated other than in the socially innocent language of likes and dislikes. The extreme improbability of the particular en- counter between particular people, which masks the probability of interchangeable chance events, induces couples to experience their mutual elec- tion as a happy accident, a coincidence which mimics transcendent design (‘made for each oth- er’) and intensifies the sense of the miraculous. (BOURDIEU, 1991, p. 240). These two fragments invite us to infer that the agency of algorithm means exponentially activate elective affinities. So, there stir up two seemingly polar possibilities, paradoxes: Amor fati and odium fati. Albeit not contemplated within the scope of this article, our final inferences are that this process may be specified in the media processes according to the categories below 9 : 9 Part of these characteristics were emphasized in Andreas Hepp’s conference in the III International Seminar on Research on Mediatization and Social Pro- cesses. A scale enlargement is a dimension always accentuated by Verón.