Olga Strelnik

The subject of this article is the process of mythmaking in the society of mass communications and the role of traditional massmedia in that process. The author chooses the semiotic paradigm as the basis of analysis. The myth is consider as a universal element of social communication reproduced at all historical stages in the unity of spontaneous and consciously designed elements. The mythmaking is define as a process of creating a mythological message or system of messages. The special role of the media in modern mythmaking is ensured by their function of "doubling" reality. The images and significations of the constructed reality look like hyperreal, even if they have no basis in objective reality. The consumer of mass media content does not have a distance to these images, that is opens the prospect of turning "history" into "nature" and the possibility of constructing mythological messages. The author claims that the mechanism of the origin of the mythological message that is the basis of the classification of all kinds of mythologies, and this is a research task for another article.