Appeal to the future in mass communication

Abstract

This article, in the framework of the system approach, considers the category of the future from the perspective of such scientific disciplines as philosophy, discourse linguistics, communication theory, psychology, methodology of science. The authors complete a definitional analysis of concepts related to the human ability to pre-empt the upcoming events (intuition, anticipation, guess, hypothesis, supposition, prediction, forecasting, prophecy). On the material of English-language and Russian-language media texts, the authors show that future can often become a subjective informational base for addressing to the mass audience by public personalities, including politicians. This probably happens due to the patterns of functioning of the human psyche, and due to the fact that there is a constant public request for information appealing to the future time category. Such a request doesn’t often depend on cultural-historical specificity. The authors conclude that prophecy can be understood as a personal particularly significant future and an axiologically super valuable reference point for future discursive connections. Some features of prophecy may include a wide emotional range, which is usually expressed in a compact form, but is potentially unlimited. The axiology of prophecy includes its ability to reduce or modify an area of intact uncertainty. Prophecies largely ensure the existence of emotionally significant non-rejected information, lacking most of the characteristic attributes of a connection with the present or the past. Studying of the deeper philosophical understanding of «prophecy» can become a prospect of further research.