Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Muniz Sodré 50 tuted of technological amplification (electronics and semiosis redefine and expand space) from the perspective. This, instead of just being “hammered”, is “irradiated” (by what experts call an echo chamber ) in the form of atomic or viral contamination. There is no such thing as inculcation (except in de- liberate disinformation strategies) but self-deception by subtle mechanisms of exposition: it is no longer the truth supposedly embedded in the fact as an unquestionable essence – which gave rise to the technical ideology of journalistic objectivity – but of desire for the fact (the one you want to receive) – articulated with the segmented logic of the market, instead of a paradigm politically referred to ideals of popular sovereignty. In effect, what we are calling “inculcation” designates an active process of introjection of intellectual content into the individual or col - lective consciousness, resulting from a more or less unitary dis- cursive regime that can be called “ideology”, for less monolithic or more conceptually ambiguous as it may be. The “exposition, on the other hand, concerns the creation of an ambiance (ways of feeling, of living) that presides over socius as a hegemonic at- mosphere, guided by a logic more emotional than the sign, more formal (the jabber, for example) than semantical, therefore, more subconscious than conscious. What we call the prevalence of the logic of the market – corresponding, in the sphere of functioning of communication/ information devices, to the phenomenon of “mediatization” – is an automatic effect of financialization, conceived as a techno- social machine capable of mobilizing different forms of power. Beside power as pure and simple domination (the hierarchy of institutionalized), we come up with the hypothesis of power as a network (the interstitial matrices of influence), which consti - tutes the expansion of the old press metaphor as “fourth power”. In this configuration, the political reach of information retracts since the public space is configured primarily by the market and by information devices. The whole liberal mythol- ogy of public opinion is in crisis, initiated by Rousseau (first in a letter, on the eve of the French Revolution, then in The Social Contract) from the Enlightenment idea that public opinion, sup- posedly a reflection of the general will, could counterbalance the exercise of power.