From Myths about the Past to the Mythologization of Time in the Digital Media Environment
The article deals with the transformation of temporal structures of mythology in the digital media environment. The authors show the role of time in the functioning of myths about the Past, consider the mechanisms of coupling the sacred past of the origins, the heroic time of struggle, the stable “pre-present”, the present and the future. The mythological “ruler of time” depends on the experience of artistic understanding of time and the way of communication. While modernity synthesizes mythological cyclical time with the linear time of historical science, postmodernity opens up opportunities for aesthetic experiments with the temporal sequence of the past, present and future. The authors show the readiness of digital masses to apply postmodern aesthetic techniques in the grassroots creation of images of the Past. The new mythologization of the Past is not an internal matter of the subject, his or her consent or protest against replicated images. The Internet environment for the first time in history freed the masses in communication, allowed them to broadcast their own version of the Past actively, and create digital content for mass consumption. Using the phenomenon of Soviet nostalgia as an example, the authors demonstrate the transition to digital mythologization of time, which freely reshapes images of the Past and Future, and arbitrarily establishes relations between them.
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