**1. Introduction**

The impact of the form of the media had more structuring effects in the domains of scientific interaction and cooperation than anywhere else in the field of social communication. The "global village" emphasized by Marshall McLuhan (1967)(1) 50 years ago, which has been largely criticized and ironized by his bygones at the time, has now become the overall reality. It is possible to define it as a scientific global village without borders, centers, or authorities. But this paradigmatic shift is generally considered either as the expression of the ultraliberal ideology (as a particular expression of the Hayekian "Grand Society") or as a simple expansion of dematerialized communication in "reflexive modernity" (Anthony Giddens). All this is not false, but it is merely reductive because what really happens today is the emergence of a third form of communication we are far from understanding properly. The most cautious attitude toward this shift is a humble heuristics with a great portion of skepticism regarding linear historicity—which always considers the new as the continuation of the old in another form—

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and some epistemological creativity more interested in original questioning than in preserving certainties.
