Ana Paula da Rosa 232 In other words, the development of digital social networks and the possibility of accessing different discursive spac- es have led to a proliferation of media enunciators, allowing us to consider hyper-mediatization not just through the prism of multiple media and hypertext, as criticized by Verón in 1997, but as a culture transformed by and through mediatization at a deeper stage. In the same sense, Andreas Hepp has been developing the idea of deep mediatization to account for an increasingly complex process where technology is not just an integral part but a driving force of ways of life. The perspective of deep me- diatization considers not only the dimensions of production and recognition but especially that of infrastructure. According to Hepp (2020, p. 3), deep mediatization extends beyond technol- ogy producers, including major corporations, and is not limited to user appropriations alone. “It is also imagined by various actors and driven forward by visions such as those described […], which often adopt positive future scenarios. We are dealing here with a highly dynamic and multilayered process.” Although the author does not explicitly discuss the imaginary, he also gives it space, considering that it is constantly evolving and is an es- sential part of what we investigate, not only because there is a “media saturation” in our daily lives but because this logic also affects our way of thinking, creating, and imagining. For the author, deep mediatization arises from the necessity to explore the mediatization enhancement, especially through digitalization processes, considering not only the me- dia themselves or social penetration but also what comes from these relationships, namely, the data that will subsequently un- dergo automated processing. In this aspect, Hepp (2020) intro- duces the notion of depth. “An advanced stage of the process in which all elements of our social world are intricately related to digital media and their underlying infrastructures (Couldry and Hepp, 2017, p. 7 apud Hepp, 2020, p. 5). He goes further by considering that “the use of deep mediatization as a term is, there- fore, deliberate because it is the stage of mediatization in which the analysis of algorithms, data, and artificial intelligence becomes crucial to our understanding of the social world” (Hepp, 2020, p. 7).
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