Omens of everyday life in television discourse

Abstract

   The article discusses new omens of everyday life that are actively functioning in a number of television series. Our study reveals the main specific features of television discourse as a new telereality, created by the manipulative influence on the consciousness of the perceiving individual.

   The purpose of the work is to investigate the main mechanism of formation and functioning of new everyday life omens in television discourse as a special type of signs, containing specifically formulated and structured knowledge about the modern world around an individual.

   The article reveals the reasons for a particular form of the TV series organization and substantiates the reasons for the use of everyday life omens as a semantic dominant of the television series “The Blind”. The described paradigm of new superstitious signs, given against the background of traditional structural and semantic constructions, suggests that superstition is becoming part of a contemporary person’s mental space. Our main research method is the discourse analysis of more than a thousand episodes of the series “The Blind”; in addition, we used the method of an open questionnaire conducted over five years. The results of the study indicate that people of different age groups demonstrate increasing interest not only in the series “The Blind”, but also in other similar series.