On hypermediatization as a process and hypermediatized societies as an outcome 277 We made two quick comments, one on Balpe’s proposal and another on the operation that Verón establishes in that text. The first is that regardless of the merits that, undoubtedly, the intervention of Balpe has for what Verón comments, which seems consistent with others of the time based on the notion of hypertext, it is worth stopping to reflect on the reasons why Verón may have rejected that he had begun to talk of hypermediatization at this moment. Previously, we recalled that Verón had distinguished two societies since the early eighties, one media-based and one mediatized. Therefore, it is not difficult to assume that a new term such as hypermediatization proposed a third one, a hypermediatized society. Considering what he expresses, it seems evident that he did not believe that hypertexts, as crucial as they were, could have a similar power, i.e., giving way to a new society. Let us focus momentarily on his text because it asks a very relevant question for the presentation we intend to make. It seems important to emphasize that Verón estab- lishes an operation that will be crucial throughout his work, which is to begin to study how social collectives are constructed by articulating his theory of social semiosis (which he had ex- posed in “El sentido como producción discursiva” based on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce – Verón, 1987), with the socio- logical notions, individuals, collective, media, and institutions that he introduced in his texts of the nineties (Verón, 1994 and 1999) and his perspective on mediatization, which, as we have seen, he had been exposing since the beginning of the eighties. What we are interested in highlighting is that this first Verón (still anthropocentric) began to take steps to analyze processes different from those he had previously studied (Verón 1986 [1981]; Verón, 1986), and that they revealed that the analysis he proposed to conduct should not only be semiotic or media- tization but operate through an articulation that also added to sociology W . e have dwelt on these processes because, as we will see soon, they have been especially considered both in the texts that led to the diagnosis that we live in a hypermediatized soci- ety and in the design of the mechanisms that currently allow us to conduct specific analyses on hypermediatization.
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