Migration and Ecological Catastrophe: Two Examples of Contemporary Secular Apocalyptic Discourses
Migration and Ecological Catastrophe: Two Examples of Contemporary Secular Apocalyptic Discourses

Summary/Abstract: Until modernity, doomsday rhetoric had been confined to the religious realm, and its characteristic forms of language, style, and persuasive argumentation evolved to adapt to the very special topic and to best fulfil the needs of written and living oral discourses of the apocalyptic rhetors and their audiences (Borchardt, 1990; O’Leary, 1998). The end-of-the-world topic did not disappear but became once more popular in the twentieth century in all segments of modern culture, with prolific propagators already in politics, philosophy, science, and, above all: media (Barkun, 2003; Wojcik, 1997). Mass media doomsayers paved the way for the new generations of apocalyptic rhetors in the age of the Internet, where the digital agora offers a global audience with instant resonance (Cardone, 2007; Howard, 2012) and an almost infinite multitude of catastrophe topics and just as many means to preach their visions of the doom and salvation of humankind. The paper1 will focus on the peculiar characteristics of Digital Doomsayers as regards their ways of persuasion assured by the hypermedia environment of the World Wide Web. Two series of examples will be given from two different environments: global warming and migration – highlighting how contemporary recombinant secular apocalyptic (motives to create apocalyptic) discourses are used by political actors and public characters in Hungarian-language mass media.

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