Russian media during the pandemic. Article One: Goals, communication technologies and methods of influencing people's minds and behavior

Media activity during the COVID-19 pandemic has been the subject of a large amount of research. However, in books and articles on the coronavirus, there is practically no analysis of the goals that the authors of media texts and media leaders set for themselves, and the technologies and means that were used in these texts to achieve the goals set. This article provides fairly robust data on the target characteristics of COVID-19 publications and the technology resources used to achieve those targets. The study shows that the authors of most of the analyzed texts seek not only to inform the audience, but also to influence the emotional and behavioral spheres of the individual, using a variety of means and technologies. At the same time, it turns out that both professional authors of media texts and amateur creators of media content set themselves the same goals. And to achieve these goals, they use very similar technologies and means of influence. One gets the impression that the authors did not think over the goals of their materials and the effectiveness of using certain means and technologies, but they all took them from some kind of a public repository, which is the information and communication universe. This means that the creating of a text, which is still described in some books and articles as a mysterious act of creativity, is actually the implementation of one of the many models that exist in the information and communication universe. These models are denoted by different concepts: axioms, scenarios, principles, attitudes, postulates, norms, rules, discourses, conventions, codes, patterns, matrices, etc. We assume that the sovereignty, independence of the subjects of media production is a fiction. In fact, by creating certain texts containing a specific goal setting, and choosing technologies and means of proving the truth of the proclaimed concepts, the authors act as agents of a specific generative system - the information and communication universe. And it is this universe that, with the help of “media agents”, generates various, including unpredictable, effects in the functioning of complex social systems.

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