Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The information image is of great importance for the life of an individual, social groups and entire communities, because it is used to perceive and comprehend the realities of the surrounding reality. Its formation, replication, as well as distortion, allows you to quite visibly manipulate both individual and collective actions under the influence of an altered or induced consciousness. As a result of such manipulations, information may lose its inherent objective character, while acquiring specific commercial or tendentious ideological and propaganda properties. One of the most striking components of the Cold War, in addition to the direct military-political confrontation, was the confrontation between the superpowers in the field of culture and sports. The number of films reflecting the theme of the Cold War reached its maximum in the 1980s, and after its fading, it sharply decreased, giving way to various kinds of variations on the theme of "pulp fiction." However, the images of the Cold War, created in the 1980s, did not become a thing of the past and were adapted by modern mass culture in the process of further development of new information technologies, which significantly expanded the possibilities of remote influence on public opinion and mass consciousness. A similar simulation of social reality is achieved through virtualization (from lat. Virtus - potential, possible) of a computer game. As a result, media-game forms make it possible to fit the images necessary for their manufacturer into far from game contexts, which in the process of entertainment become an effective means of social and political propaganda, broadcasting distortions of real historical events to millions of audiences in accordance with the specified parameters of their virtual copy. Such game practices not only contribute to the distortion of real-historical events in the mass consciousness, but can also be used to purposefully "revise history," demonstrating such a dangerous property as equivocativity (from lat. Aequivocatio - ambiguity), which provides ambiguity of interpretations of the same event or its objective causes. At the same time, they have a cumulative effect on public opinion, acting not only as a simulacrum, but also as a narrative that can determine the effect of historical memory and consolidate the artificially formed image of the enemy in the information and visual field in order to further manipulate the mass consciousness.
Source: Metamorphoses of history
Author: Igor Egorov
Institutions: North-West Institute of Management, Pskov State University
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4411713516