The theoretical-methodological problematization in circulation and platform research 205 According to him, circulation is no longer seen as a passageway that would not leave visible traces of its modes of operation since, “despite its ‘immaterial logics’, the internet gains a certain corporeality insofar as it is already transformed, according to prognoses, into a new great battlefield” (Verón, 2014) instituted by discursive practices that shift toward it” (Fausto Neto, 2018, p. 27). In this way, the focus of the research carried out and supervised has been to study complexities in which circulation is no longer seen as a passageway, but rather as a phenomenon that needs to be analyzed and, to this end, it is possible to iden- tify and extract clues in the most distinct discursive materiali- ties. These complex processualities affect and transform our social relations, communication processes, and, also, our work of investigation, as we have problematized in previous moments (Borelli & Dias, 2018; Romero & Borelli, 2021). Braga (2017) argues that there are continuous and dis- persed communication flows. In his view, media products rep- resent an important materiality in the processes of communication, but it is not necessarily a point of departure or arrival. The product that circulates “[...] is rather a characterizer of the out- put and input elements that connect the interactional devices in the circuit” (Braga, 2017, p. 53). In this way, the product is one more integral moment in complex circuits which, in the case of significant material such as texts, allows data to be captured so that it can be observed, analyzed, and interpreted. Thus, societies undergoing mediatization challenge us to think of interpretative mechanisms that are capable of mapping and extracting clues from social, cultural, and institutional transformations. These discursive materialities – dispersed in different temporalities and spatialities, such as platforms – can be converted into data to be manipulated in academic research dealing with communication issues. Hepp & Couldry (2020) write that the history of mediatization over the last six centuries can be understood as three successive and overlapping waves: mechanization, electrification, and digitalization. For them, we are experiencing the beginning of a fourth wave, that of datafication. These last two waves cor- respond to what the authors call “deep mediatization, as they are
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