Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Vera V. França 28 the presence and interference of the logic of the medium in the development of specific fields (as when we refer to the mediati- zation of politics, religion, etc.). At a macro level, mediatization concerns society as a whole, which would be affected when the interactions that constitute it start to happen, preferentially, through the media. In this second approach, and taking as a reference the central role of the interactional processes between individuals, groups, and sectors of a society in the construction of their re- ality, Braga highlights the particularity of the various historical moments according to the interactional processes that charac- terized them – orality, writing, and, at present, the transition to the “mediatized” form, marked by the introduction of new techniques. However, it is not that they (the techniques) appear “spontaneously” and modify the environment: the creation of communicational technologies, in a dialectical movement, obeys the demands of the previous interactional processes, and, by arising, generates new interactional dynamics. Thus, the mediatization process (whose history is, natu- rally, much more complex and subject to contingent variations from country to country) would cor- respond, roughly , to this “evolution” of technical implantations in the service of “previous” society objectives for autopoietic derivatives in the elabo - ration of particular logics (BRAGA, 2006, p. 16). According to Braga (2006), therefore, mediatization, in a macro approach, is not limited to the presence of new technologi- cal medium but concerns the prevalence of “social processes of mediatized interaction, which they start to include, to cover the others that do not disappear but adjust themselves” (ibid., p. 11). Thus, the interactional processes constitute the focus of his gaze and receive newcharacteristics in amediatized society: a deferred and diffuse procedure; a complex game between the individual and the social; the tendency to open and delegitimize esoteric patterns, according to which specialized fields relate to society in general. “Everything is exposed, then everything becomes open to scanning, it becomes familiar to everyone (ibid., p. 25).”