From News to Gameplay When Platforms Turn Society into Plot

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication[1]' and ‘the media scenario[2]' and analyses how narrative has become the dominant operating system of contemporary media and how this shift defines a new paradigm of mass communication structured by what can be called the ‘media scenario’. Rather than treating media as neutral channels that transmit information, it approaches them as narrative environments that script perception, organise attention, and turn social reality into staged experience. Drawing on conflict-management research on polarised societies, the article shows how public disputes escalate when narrative collapses into single, identity-protective stories that simplify complexity, moralise disagreement, and convert facts into instruments of mobilisation. It then situates this narrative condition within broader media theory, arguing that interactivity intensifies the transformation of audiences into participants whose roles are shaped by platform design, metrics, and algorithmic visibility. In this context, narrative is no longer primarily a cultural form but an infrastructural mechanism: it governs what becomes socially legible, emotionally actionable, and politically believable. The article concludes that depolarisation depends less on enforcing a single ‘truth’ than on cultivating narrative literacy, institutional incentives for complexity, and media practices that can hold plural stories side by side without converting disagreement into war. [1] Ayolov, P. (2026). The New Paradigm of Mass Communication. [online] doi:https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5998697. [2] Ayolov, Peter (2026) The Media Scenario: Scriptwriting for Journalists eBook: Kindle Store. Amazon.com: [online]