Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

José Luiz Braga 238 meantime, it is essential to develop comprehensive perspectives about the diversity, but without risking the undue generalization of a few singular characteristics just because they are showier, more visible in terms of materials (for instance, technology), or generate reverberating events, which do not efficiently express general patterns or stabilized arrangements. The context in which we enter our reflection on digital social networks is the growing social mediatization. This is not restricted to a relationship between society and its media – as if they were external to one another. The “institutional tradition” (HEPP, 2014, p. 47) explains mediatization as the influence of media logic on other social sectors that only undergo changes. This does not seem to be enough. Acknowledging the use of media as a process of society, we noticed that social initiatives and experiments, in all sectors of activity and reflection, turn mediatization into an “interac- tional process of reference” (BRAGA, 2007). If we are to observe the circulation of the media speech, it is not because we consider the media as guiding the social behavior patterns, but to under- stand, in this circulation, how the social sectors act in activating this interactional mode. One of the characteristics of new technologies is pre- cisely to offer a sharing space for very differentiated interac- tions. They are not specialized. In a sense, they are partly empty codes – that is, they can be filled with a particularly wide variety of content, actions, strategies, and may serve to different objec - tives, challenges, confrontations, and urgencies. The interplay between the modes of interaction and the handling of all social issues is so intense that mediatization processes and experiences can be approached as symptoms to probe and apprehend society. In parallel, a perception about the social issues, in different aspects, informs us about the mean- ings and forwarding given in circulations activated using new technologies. Based on these propositions, we understand that the study of digital social networks requires an analysis of the re- lationship systems developed there, rather than an observation restricted to technologies.