NEO-MYTHS: ISSUE-ATTENTION CYCLES AS MEDIATIZED SOCIAL DRAMAS

This article suggests that in times of digital mass media, mediatized political issues create a self-perpetuating phenomenon that is here titled a neo-myth. Through combining interdisciplinary theories of Issue-Attention Cycles and Social Dramas, the article argues that the standardized ways that political issues are framed, mass-mediated and consumed in a contemporary society, paradoxically create a cyclical and self-perpetuating pattern. Instead of being linear, rational and cause-to-solution oriented, they become stereotypical, cyclical and performative, thus resembling mythological patterns both content and form-wise. The article discusses how and why these neo-myths form, as well as how political, public and media actors interact within the process. It discusses them in terms of their emergence, structure, causality, processual logics and formal variety, and suggests that the phenomenon falls in line with the findings of recent research on the shifting knowledge patterns in times of digital culture.