Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Scope and variations of the concept of mediatization 39 organizations, legally instituted in a society, such as a university, the armed forces. Direct and mediated communicative practices are in- stituted in all societies; ours developed and has consolidated particular forms. The use of the phone and now of WhatsApp, for example, are instituted practices. However, the media or the different media also occupy their place, obey organizational pol- icies, follow a professional performance, obey a division of roles and functions, are governed by specific legislation. And more: if the media constituted as a proper field, an institution, it is essential to understand how it intervenes, and even causes changes, in other fields, other institutions. - Attention to specific logics. The media comprises sev- eral media – several devices, with their proper functioning and logics. Hjarvard, recovering the concept of affordance (potential uses of an object) presented by James Gibson, emphasizes: “The ways in which media intervene into social interaction depends on the concrete characteristics of the medium in question, that is, both material and technical features and social and aesthetic qualities” (HJARVARD, 2014, p. 52). Thus, in our studies, it is not enough to talk about the media in general; a careful analysis must be attentive to the particularities of the functioning and orderings of each one of them. - Analysis of configurations, construction processes, me- dia crossings. Some communicative studies are more punctual and focus on particular situations and occurrences. However, no communicative act is isolated; they are a sequence of acts, mo- ments of a process, chains. So even the specific studies, aware of the necessity, but also of the arbitrariness of the cuttings made in the empirical corpus of all research, must pay attention to the interrelationship between the different elements that constitute a presented communicative process, the nature of construction that overlays it, the interweaving that configures it – interweav - ing between different media practices, different interactive pro- cesses, both those mediated by new digital technologies, as well as those that happen through massive media or on direct inter- actions, of an interpersonal nature. - Combination f synchronous and diachroni views . Communication occurs over time – and recovering the tempo-