Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Muniz Sodré 48 erwise, since this ideal feeds on the narrative effects of political historicity that characterized the press since the beginning of its flourishing in the 19th century, amid the Enlightenment concept of public opinion and the realization of (civil) law of expression and freedom of thought. The ideology underlying journalism is still to attune liberally and ethically (therefore, with public vir- tues) with the basic principles of democratic sovereignty, such as constitutionalism, civil and political freedom or with collec- tive ideals – the visibility of decision making of the State, the establishment of the truth about vital issues for the collectivity, exempt information about everyday life, etc. These political effects – different in nature from the mere mobilization obtained by opinion leaders in current elec- tronic networks – have always been generated by the diversity of expressions corresponding to different class positions regarding the three powers of the State and the functioning of the economy. The reality of representative democracy is fueled by the play of differences between class positions or political alliances in the face of constitutional powers. Totalitarianism arises when this reality is replaced by a simple juridical formalism (three powers and a bureaucratically articulated Constitution without political mediation), erasing the representative plurality in favor of an effective anti-constitutional power, whose modalities vary from personal, military, class, theocratic to partisan-bureaucratic dic- tatorships (Russia and China, for example). The political transi- tivity of journalistic information has been an exclusive feature of the representative democracy. But this liberal, parliamentary, delegated democracy – historically affirmed since the end of the 19th century – contains theoretical alternatives, sparsely suggested by authors with re- formist or revolutionary tendencies. For example, Gramsci, who has always expressed theoretical distrust of the form of parlia- mentary democracy, suggests the hypothesis of an “advisory de- mocracy” (or Soviet) as superior, criticizing the formalist-proce- dural consensus on voting as the final moment of the electoral dispute for representation and encouraging the search for a different relationship between governments and governed. Al- though no alternative has succeeded in real-historical terms, the Italian thinker’s assessment was perfectly rational in the sense