Mario Carlón 286 ly expressed in that the analyses fall, as far as we know, on different objects and levels of research. The focus of studies on hy- permediatization, based on Veronian heritage, moves away from the tendency to believe that the meaning (or the level of what Hjarvard calls mediation) should not be studied and is probably less “technologistic” (it maintains its interest in the media, a no- tion in which technology and devices occupy a place, but in deep interaction with social practices and their modalities of produc- tion and circulation of meaning). Digitization: a wave, according to Couldry and Hepp (2016), on which deep mediatization is based and whose link with hyper-mediatization and the hypermedia circulation of meaning is clear. It is likely that one of the most talked about characteristics of digitization, which is virtuality, is not very im- portant for hyper-mediatization studies. Much more relevant is that the general digitization of all media and media systems generated the materialization of all discourses and their com- patibility. In other words, on the one hand, the fact that in a so- ciety of “stratified mediatization,” a discourse arising, e.g., from WhatsApp can generate a flow of meaning towards social net- works (being shared on Twitter, for instance) and then taken up by the mass media. And that, then, all that path of circulation (it should not be forgotten here that circulation is not linear, that in each level there are operations of recognition and right after of production and enunciation, etc.) can be studied thanks to the fact that it has materialized (in the same way that a thread can be studied on Twitter). The articulation of these two phenom- ena generated the end of the invisibility of discursive circulation (a phenomenon that began to be determined in the study of in- stitutional communications by Antonio Fausto Neto [2010] and about which I resumed [in Carlón, 2022b]. Platforms/Applications: this is one of the keys to the current debates on mediatization because many approaches warn of a media crisis. Our focus here is that it is clear there was a crisis of the media as institutions and their power to pro- gram social life from the offer (crisis of the mass media – Car- lón and Scolari, 2009; Verón, 2009). Nonetheless, that crisis was accompanied by the emergence of platforms such as Facebook, the first YouTube (before Google purchased it when it promoted
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