Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Ana Paula da Rosa 192 question of disregarding the classic elements such as production and reception but understanding that we no longer can focus on the medium or the message. This means that circulation leads us to another place – that of the dispute for meaning. The place of circulation is the ‘between,’ that of indetermination, expansion of times and spaces, of logics that escape us. The communica- tion analyst, a role that we assume in this text, is responsible for trying, even though aware of the incompleteness, to reconstruct operations and paths to try to capture what moves in flows. Thus, we adopt two central aspects as a departure point: 1) the profound changes in the conditions of circulation and circularity of social discourses from the access made pos- sible by the web, and 2) the complexities of the communication process per se once the social actors ascend to media interfering in their logics likewise – especially the journalistic ones. To think about these two points, we turn to images. Within this media- tized landscape, where the access to dispositifs is increasingly amplified, we perceive an irruption of imagery productions com - ing from the most different places, both journalistic and from non-media institutions and, very often, from social actors. Such productions make explicit that there are logics at play, once vid- eos, pictures, memes, and real-time transmissions are not only conceived for visibility or as a democratization of perspectives but are images produced and designed for circulation. So, there are evident marks of fixating strategies and valuing operations that prolong the circulation of particular images. To understand circulation in its dynamics, we pro- posed ourselves to build a case of analysis marked by a field of observation that cannot be cut out over time, particularly, but which breaks it down into relationships. As Fausto Neto (2013) well observes, mediatization takes place as a bundle of relationships, but they are naturally unequal when we start to attribute the strength of the communicational process, no longer to isolated elements, but the circulation of meaning. It is in this aspect that we structure our text: firstly, the strain between access and excess; secondly, the problem of the media and mediatization logics that cross image production. Finally, we dedicate ourselves to the case of this research, which emerg- es from the circulation, and, at the same time, is only configured