Mediation

5 Communicational Mediations

ICS researchers and practitioners employ the concept of mediation to qualify our relation to the other or to change, power, institutions or more generally the social link through communication (Lamizet and Silem 1997; Caune 1999; Rasse 2000; Dufrêne and Gellereau 2001). “Mediation is mobilized as a concept able to describe the specific nature of threefold communication dispositives, but also as a problem that can question certain objects in a different manner” (Vandeninden 2016, p. 19). “Mediation is situated in a context of muddled communication: mediation practices and dispositives must bring together, relate, mend a relationship, etc., but without involving orders or power” (Servais 2016, p. 9).

Mediation is the application range of the communication technologies designed to provoke, maintain or support relations to cultural products, exhibitions, conferences, guided visits and multimedia dispositives. Even if a mediator cannot use them skillfully, he or she guides the implementations that involve these technologies in relation to a mediation project that he or she must conceive and share with technicians in order to give meaning to each element as well as the whole dispositive (Rasse 2000). The dispositive is considered in the sense established by Michel Foucault (le dispositif); in other words, it is defined as a network built between elements, and, in this respect, it is considered to even have the potential to bring together ideas that are ...