Professional Perception Shift of Digital Society Values among IT Students (Results of Empirical Research)

Abstract

The methodological principles of the study are the ideas of H. Innis and M. McLuhan about the role of mass media in the formation of modern society, where a person's access to information - working with big data and participating in the production of information - is the main factor in the shift in the perception of values. The shift in the perception of the values of the digital society in our understanding is the transformation of the ideas of IT specialists about significant phenomena that arise as a result of their involvement in the process of producing and analyzing information. Involvement in the production of information can be considered in several ways, for example, as the creation of information content, or as the creation of mechanisms, software, devices providing the creation of tools for the production and analysis of information. Shifts in the perception of information, in our opinion, are determined by the nature of the attitude to information and depend on the professional orientation of the respondents. The accumulation and growth of contradictions in the perception of values between people of different professional orientations constitutes an urgent social problem of stratification in a digital society. The hypothesis was that the nature of involvement in the information process will have a diverse effect on the nature of shifts in the perception of the values of the digital society, which will reveal features of these shifts as caused by the specifics of professional training. The object of the study was the 3rd-year students of the Faculty of Journalism (96.7% of the general population) and the Faculty of Computer Technologies and Informatics (94.3%). The subject of the study is the peculiarities of the shift in the perception of digital information by students of the IT specialty in comparison with students of the humanities. The purpose of the study is to identify and study the shift in the perception of the values of the digital society among students of IT specialties as caused by the peculiarities of professional training. The results of the study revealed relevant characteristics of the shift in the perception of the values among students of IT specialties: firstly, the shift in the values of the digital society in comparison with the values of past years; secondly, a number of different stages in the formation of such a shift; thirdly, the separation of understanding of “companionship” and “communication”; fourthly, the peculiarities of the perception of IT tools rather as a means (for journalists) and as a goal of activity (for IT specialists); fifthly, the presence of a set of shifts in understanding the importance of such characteristics of IT activities as ethics, responsibility, accessibility, security and a number of others; sixth, minor shifts in understanding the role of the IT space as a potential means of self-education, typical for students of both groups. The empirical study has confirmed the presence of a shift in the perception of the values of the digital society among students of IT specialties as caused by the peculiarities of their professional training.