Культурная жизнь и культурные практики молодежи малых городов: особенности саморегуляции

Abstract

The theoretical basis of the analysis is the authors' concept of socio-cultural self-regulation of youth life. Cultural life, which is one of the aspects of a person's social life, is considered as a special form of organization and regulation of their life activity.The specificity of cultural life and cultural practices in it is determined by the semantic perception of culture and regulated by the semantic attitudes that are formed in different types of culture (basic and youth subcultures). They are sources of identity formation and determine the orientation and specific features of the cultural life of young people. The combination of different cultural bases — basic and subcultural — and their use in the analysis of the cultural life of young people makes it possible to identify the connection between various semantic projections and the peculiarities of the cultural life and cultural practices of young people in small towns. The empirical analysis is based on the results of a sociological study conducted in 2017 representing Russian young people aged 15 to 29. The authors demonstrate the age differences of cultural practices in the structure of leisure activities of young people in a small town, involvement in activity forms of culture, and their difference from young people in general. A special place in the article is occupied by the section devoted to the self-regulation of the cultural life of young people in a small town. An analysis of the relationship between of young people’s life-purpose values and their attitude to culture is carried out. On the ground of the previously established and tested typology of cultures, the influence of their characteristic semantic attitudes on the perception of culture is analyzed. A conclusion is made about the extremely contradictory phenomenon of culture in the minds of young residents of small towns and about the ambiguous influence of different cultural attitudes on the cultural life in a small town. The findings are substantiated about the correlation of terminal and instrumental meanings in young people’s cultural life.