The significance of the paper is predefined by the qualitative shifts in the information environment of society, characterized by the fluidity of the media. Social and technological changes in the Internet have had a crucial impact on the media audience’s perception of cultural artefacts. A decisive and ongoing factor has been the change in the functions of the audience, which is increasingly being transformed into an actor of information relations in society. In particular, there is a radical rearrangement of the actors in the subject-object relationship in media propaganda. In the media environment, the linear flow of time gives way to a chaotic flow that violates possible cause-effect relations; the values of artefacts of the past and present “stop having a certain propaganda impact on the audience, rather they themselves are “irradiated” by the propaganda intensions of the audience. Thus, the practices of symbolic domination implemented in the media environment acquire new forms and new social content. The empirical basis of the research was the findings of focus groups comparing the socio-philosophical meaning of movies from different eras (1968, 2015) and different countries (the USSR, the USA), with the same events as the basis of the movies. The meaning of the current problem predetermined the reference to the works of philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, theorists of journalism (Z. Bauman, I. Hoffman, S. Dudnik, D. Dubrovsky, S. Ilchenko, T. Eriksen, etc.). Methodology of focus groups, supplemented by the highlighting of semantic counterpoints of the discussions, their grouping and further inclusion in the context of the discussion to record the respondents’ reflection on the generalizing conclusions was used; content analysis of the transcripts of focus groups was conducted. The materials of the paper may be of interest to culturologists, political scientists and theorists of journalism. Keywords: fluidity of media, mediatization, artefact, propaganda, symbolic dominance, reflection