Past and Present in the Media Environment: Value Resonance

Abstract

The article raises the question of the special properties of the modern media environment, capable of playing many social roles – an informer, a reasoner, an archiver, etc. The most diverse texts in a latent form are “on the shelves” of the network space, but once brought together in one semantic field they are capable of causing the cumulative effect on the audience, resonating the values of the past in the present, actualizing them. This phenomenon is directly related to the phenomenon of historical memory, which is inherent in both society as a whole and its mass media, largely determines the behavior of a contemporary. The study of topical issues of the historical memory of the society, including its media environment, has become an integral part of the scientific research of philosophers, culturologists, and journalism theorists. Thus, the relevance of this article is determined by the requests from both science and practice ‒ the deepening of crisis situations in the world has led to the demand for analysis of the manifestations of historical memory in modern mass media. Historical memory is ambivalent, its presence in the public consciousness is always marked by ambiguous assessments and approaches to the facts of history and their significance in modern political and cultural life. It is more important to understand how the ideological and moral components of the past and the present are docking in the media environment of our days, to what extent they can resonate and, therefore, be included in the creative practice of the humanistically oriented mass media. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to determine the hermeneutic possibilities of the student youth in interpreting a historically significant journalistic text given in comparison with the politically relevant text of the modern media environment. Accordingly, a focus group program was drawn up from among students – future journalists specializing in media and society culture. Separated by more than half a century, the texts of the essay “Clash” (1963) by the “Izvestia“ journalist Anatoly Agranovsky and the conversations of the journalist-blogger Yury Podolyaka (2022) were submitted for discussion. The results of the focus group showed that in the actual field of meanings, the values of the past effectively resonate with the present, and their interpretation by the audience leads to a reassessment of the ideology as a component of the public consciousness in the direction of emphasizing the urgent need to create a unifying ideology in the life of modern Russian society.