Mario Carlón 272 from the beginning, simultaneously addresses mediatization and meaning, we will ask ourselves what the current relation- ship between the concepts (hyper)mediatization and hyperme- dia circulation is, given that both involve processes and are key to thinking about our contemporaneity. 2. Mediatization and mediatized societies: processes and outcomes Thanks to the dynamism that, in recent years, has characterized studies on mediatizations, it is now sufficiently known that, in the early eighties, Eliseo Verón (2001 [1984]; 1986) dis- tinguished media societies from mediatized ones. According to our interpretation, he established his distinction by considering the outcome of mediatization. Thus, on the one hand, a media society results from the effect of a representational “conception” or “ideology” in which “it is considered that (the media) repre- sent its thousand facets, (and) constitute a kind of mirror (more or less deforming, it does not matter), where society is reflected and by which it communicates” (Verón, 2001 [1984], p. 14). The essence of this scenario, says Verón, is that “it marks a border between an order that is that of the ‘real’ of society (its history, its practices, its institutions, its resources, its conflicts, its cul- ture)” (p. 14) and another order, which is representation, that of reproduction and which has been progressively taken over by the media” (p. 14). On the other hand, there is a mediatized society that emerged when there was the outbreak of “the bor- der between the real of society and its representations” (p. 14) under the suspicion that “the media are not only mechanisms of reproduction of a ‘real’ to which they copy (more or less cor- rectly) but rather mechanisms of production of meaning” (p. 1415). This society, which he also calls “in the process of mediati- zation,” is one in which “institutions, practices, conflicts, culture, begin to be structured in direct relation to the existence of the media” (p. 15). Now, it is necessary to clarify. In those few pages, the idea of process is also present. Not only because when he refers to a mediatized society, he also expresses that he is living in a
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