Uncertainty and indeterminacy in Brazilian social and media formation: references to think of the problem of recognition in the public space

Abstract

In this article, we propose the concept of mediatization as central to understanding the processes of disruption, uncertainty, and indeterminacy in the social formation of Brazil. This proposition does not replace the socio-anthropological approaches that propose indeterminacy as a characteristic of societies where there are no social practices symbolically referenced (Lahire, 2002). We suggest, however, that this movement that we call ascending is reproduced in an exponential way, adding time and space deferred, due to the mediatization of society, in which the use of the media by social actors breaks with discursive hegemonies of media and mediated institutions. The mediatization is conceptualized in three spheres: a) the information flows between Ecclesia, Agora, and Oikos (Bratosin, 2014; Ferreira, 2016); b) the uses, practices, and appropriations of the means, especially in digital networks; c) circulation, central in the constitution flows. Circulation is not going from hand to hand. Circulation is the operation of picking up, manipulating, in the struggle for recognition, within the framework of flows. Therefore, circulation refers to the conflicts and possibilities of social recognition, triggered by actors and institutions, media and mediatized. We suggest, therefore, a new design for the understanding of the current symbolic tensions in Latin America, based on meta-reflections from its epistemologies.