Política, espacio público y mediatizaciones pre-mediáticas

Abstract

In this presentation I discuss some presuppositions of the notion of mediatization of politics, in particular some epistemological, theoretical and historical consequences implied in the derivation “of” (mediatization of). My starting point is that the process of mediatization in relation to politics is not triggered by the media but by the contingent needs for publicity that, throughout modern history, stem from the emergence of political systems organized into states. Thus, historical leaps in this process are produced, instead, by the contingent needs for public attention of a given system, combined with its inability to capture public attention with its own resources. In its contemporary form, mediatization denoted, then, a kind of performative relationship between the media system and other social systems, which attempted to gain access to the media product: publicity. Two reflections arise from this thesis: the first is that “politics” was mediatized before the configuration of modern media; the second is that with Internet-based technologies, institutional systems partially recover that capacity to produce public attention with “their own resources” that they had lost since the mid-nineteenth century.