9 Societal Mediations
As we have previously mentioned, mediation does not merely constitute a conflict management technique. It is also another means of communication and a type of action governing the relations between the state and civil society, and, in this sense, mediation is involved at practically all levels of society. Political mediation, public communication and multimedia libraries are topics researched in Information and Communication Sciences (ICS).
Lamizet places political mediation between “the mirror experience” and social and institutional practices. Therefore, he conceives of mediation as a dialectic between the two dimensions of our experience: the individual dimension of our experience and the collective dimension of our existence.
According to this author, the media and the other social forms of communication constitute mediations since they ensure that their readers or users in the public space can acquire information that constitutes the collective culture specific to an identity, a social group or a country at a given moment in its history (Lamizet 1998).
Media communication is approached from a cross-disciplinary point of view; the researchers who consider this topic do so by relying on theoretical resources and multiple methods, which derive from one or several disciplines.
In the research carried out in France on media communication, authors favor, for example, semiotic, sociohistorical, ethnographic, sociological, sociopolitical, economic and/or ...