Myth in the Communicative Space of Modem Culture

The article analyzes the process of constructing myth within the context of mass communication and the role played herein by traditional mass media. The semiological paradigm was chosen as the unified base of analysis. Myth is considered to be a universal element of social communication, reproduced at all historical stages; myth-making is regarded as the process of creating a mythological message or message system. The special role of the mass media in modern myth-making is based on their function of "doubling" the reality. The images and values of the constructed reality look hyper-real due to multiple repetitions, even in the case when they have no basis in the objective reality. The consumer of the mass media content has no distance from these images, which opens up the prospect of turning "history" into "nature", that is, the possibility of constructing mythological messages. The article argues that it is the mechanism of a mythological message emergence that serves as a clear basis for the classification of all sorts of mythologies. The task of clarifying the type of consciousness expressed in mythological messages receives a separate status and is therefore taken outside the limits of the article.