The State and Features of the Media Culture of Modern Youth

Abstract

The relevance of the topic “media culture of youth” is due to the insufficiency of special studies of the problem from the point of view of library activities. The article presents the results of a sociological study of the media culture of young people, conducted on the basis of the Chelyabinsk Regional Library for Youth. It is shown that it is characterized by a certain number of features of media consumption, where “getting information about what is happening in the world” is indicated as the most important by respondents. The problems of defining the concept of “media culture of youth” as a particular variant of the term “information culture”, and a comparison of the common grounds between information and media culture are raised, as well as the difference introduced by the emergence of the concept of “media culture”. Personality characteristics associated with a developed media culture are determined. The author cites the data of some sociological and statistical studies reflecting the peculiarities of the media culture peculiar to young people. The functions of the media and their influence on youth, the specifics of the existence of youth in the media environment are considered. The author highlights the peculiarity of youth activity in the media environment, including the specifics of information retrieval, the organization of communication through its interactive forms, the importance for the development of personal media culture of the phenomenon of social networks, its impact on changing the traditions of writing. The problem of network threats to users and the role of media culture formation in order to minimize such threats are considered separately. The role of the Internet in the formation of a synthesized youth subculture, which includes special etiquette, slang and hierarchy in the process of communication, is noted. The author provides data on the most typical properties of the media culture of young people, based on both existing and own research. An attempt is made to systematize these properties – the priority of communication through social networks, listening and browsing media files, turning to online games, running a network business, are called the most characteristic ones. The presented information and the results of the author’s own research are relevant for the development of strategies and tactics of libraries to form the media culture of young users.