The Scripted Life of Public Truth: From Pseudo-Events to Pseudo-Worlds

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ', ‘the media scenario ' and pseudo-events and pseudo-worlds as the central operating units of the new paradigm of mass communication and of the media scenario. Building on The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, pseudo-events are treated not as occasional distortions of public life but as a routine mode of reality-production: events increasingly occur in order to be narrated, circulated, replayed, and emotionally ‘confirmed’ by audiences. The argument extends this logic from events to worlds. Drawing on possible worlds theory and contemporary narratology associated with Marie-Laure Ryan, pseudo-worlds are defined as coherent but strategically engineered storyworlds that can be entered, inhabited, and defended as if actual. In networked environments, these worlds are sustained less by evidence than by repeatable narrative roles, affective cues, and the infrastructural design of platforms. Hyperlinks, interfaces, and procedural media function as ontological switches that intensify re-centring and multiply ‘world transitions’, enabling rapid movement between fiction, documentation, and hybrid scenography. As a result, publics no longer share a single ‘mass’ reality but participate in overlapping and competing world-models, each with its own internal truth conditions and moral coordinates. The media scenario is therefore approached as a system of world-building in which attention, identity, and political alignment are organised through scripted participation rather than deliberation. The article concludes that the key struggle of contemporary communication is not primarily over facts, but over the design, accessibility, and durability of pseudo-worlds that convert narrative coherence into social power.