Significant Cultural Code Establishment In German-Speaking Media Discourse

The article explores complex integrative nature of the media space. It clarifies and updates methodological approaches to the study of media text as a cultural code, and emphasizes the relevance of studying specific mechanisms of media text impact. The study analyzes the methods for modeling value orientations, identifies and describes the explicit and implicit mechanisms for its implementation. The authors conclude that a modern media text should be considered not just as a message containing information, but also as a part of a meta-reality that actively creates its own cognitive, cultural, social and value orientations. The analysis carried out made it possible to identify the main mechanisms that ensure this process – the implication and creation of a non-linear semantic structure of the communicative space. From a language viewpoint, these mechanisms are implemented as decoding, implicating hidden meanings, free combination and completion of presuppositions and context, which contributes to the growth of conflict and the evaluative nature of media space. In conclusion, the authors emphasize the importance of a cognitive approach to the study of a media text, i.e. the interaction of meta-reality of the media space with the reality and our idea about it in the cognitive space – individual mental experience of a reader. The media text that defines the information array at the same time defines associative, contextual, semantic, and evaluative links between text elements and the whole fragments, thus being a constructive model that generalizes and represents isolated elements of meaning into a coherent picture.