Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Vera V. França 36 incidence of communicative practices in contemporary society. After all, they come together within the tradition and the already vast repertoire of Communication Theories. Mediation The concept of mediation forms the most remembered pair, the counterpoint, or complement most present in the dis- cussion on mediatization. Mediation and mediatization form a permanent pair. Why this proximity? As already mentioned, for Mu- niz Sodré (and also for other authors), mediatization can be explained, in a first rapprochement, as mediation by media – a technological mediation or techno-mediation. Our great reference, when it comes to mediation, is un- doubtedly Jesús Martín-Barbero. In the classic book From media to mediations (1987 [1997]), the author sought to emphasize the cultural (and socio-historical) mediations that traverse commu- nication. Talking about television, he initially points out three major mediations – family life, social temporality, and cultural competence. They are joined by production dynamics, formats, industrial logic. The idea – and great innovation – that the book has brought in the 1980s was to invert the vertical logic of the functionalist theory of Communication (what the media do for/ with society), as well as the closure of the technological and semiological paradigms that came marking communicational studies in Latin America, seeking an integrative perspective of the various elements that make up the communicative process (LOPES, 2014, p. 69). Martín-Barbero sought to show that soci- ety and the audience are not a tabula rasa , to be registered by the media, but a dense compound of agents, history, culture. Its first formulation, therefore, brought culture, experience, assem- blages of different factors (such as technological). In the following years, Martín-Barbero (1998 6 ) re- formulated his thinking and replaced the axis of “cultural me- diations of communication” for “communicational mediations of culture”. In this second formulation, in Lopes’ reading, “the 6 According to Introduction to the 5th edition of De los medios a las mediaciones , Barcelona: Ed. Gustavo Gili, 1998.