the spectacle bigger than it was. In their eyes, the hero had to be more boisterous, stronger and more colourful to continue to attract the attention of the public at large. Schwarzenegger seemed to be the ideal candidate for this. But nothing was gained when it came to the quality of social participation. After initial successes, people soon saw through the loud-mouth effect. It quickly evaporated and showed counter-productive results.. Lara Croft is different: the concept of her identity in the media is open, not closed Both candidates, and the associations the media have created for them, have the necessary attributes, such as strength, decisiveness and uncompromising shrewdness, in seemingly hopeless situations. All of this is accompanied by a touch of erotic charisma. But Croft does not leave the consumer inconveniently stuck in his traditionally passive role. Her identity actually feeds and relies on the active subjects, the voters. The consumer can add personality features to, and make decisions (decision models) concerning, her basic character, which is a top product of modern identity design. This actually makes the consumer a producer. The current producers of marketing identities created through the media, in contrast to their colleagues at Schwarzenegger Studios, have been transformed from pure makers to communicators in the ‘Lara Croft project’. They continue to initiate and animate the birthing process of the media product, but then withdraw to encourage a creative process at the social level, which they then co-ordinate. The circle of products can thus be extended to acquire a broad social basis. From the medieval icon, via the sketched and, later, the animated image, to virtual reality, the associative transfer of identities has penetrated ever deeper into people’s perceived horizons. In past centuries, individuals were able to verify all relevant information themselves, such as the social organisation of villages. The quality of the harvest, the consequences of this quality for trade with neighbouring villages, the integrity of their fellow citizens, the analysis of the economic, ecological and socio-cultural preconditions, could all be assessed, as it were, within the boundaries of their own horizons.
77
Page
With the growth of mass societies and their metropolises, the life-defining external factors and the need to transfer information also grew. The world became less transparent, more complex. Information now had to be transferred by third parties, by organisations that set up entire PR industries for the purpose, and by advertisers who created media identities with propaganda formats geared to the spirit of the times. These increasingly complex mechanisms changed individuals into consumers of their own reality, which was supposedly of their own making,