Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Scope and variations of the concept of mediatization 33 municative practices, shortening distances, accelerating time, expanding audiences. It was the era of the mass media – written press, cinema, radio, television. Despite the particularity of each one, these media, together, constituted a new communicational reality. Other communication technologies were developed at the end of the century XX, the main one being digital communi- cation, which unfolded on countless platforms. They introduced a qualitative change in reality, and the concept of mediatization sought to account for this difference. But where and what, ex- actly, does this conceptual difference consist? Mass culture and cultural industry The concept of “cultural industry”, coined by T. Ador- no and M. Horkheimer, emerged in the late 1940s, at a time of strong presence of the mass media. Its correlate, in other tradi- tions of the same period, was the concept of “mass culture” (MO- RIN, 1962 [1977]). Without going into the distinction of the two concepts here, we can recover their central elements: the mas- sive presence of these new media, marked by a unilateral flow; constituting massive audiences; commercial (market) nature of cultural production; ideological bias (or nature), consuming processes of manipulation and alienation. The concept referred to the performance of the written press (newspapers and maga- zines), cinema, radio, and television. The concept of mediatization , in its turn, seeks to en- compass a broader scenario that includes the determinant presence of the digital media and a process of inter-relation between them (convergence). The unilateral flow was replaced by different flows. The ideas of manipulation and alienation are problematized: the media manipulate products, but not consciences. Passive receivers were replaced by active users; differentiated uses, reinterpretations, resistances, flows, and counterflows make communication environments much more complicated. In the current discussions (with lesser or greater em- phasis, depending on the author), the reference to the strength of economic interests, the market dimension, the corporate in- terests that penetrate and seek to hegemonize the new environ-