Youth upbringing: a factor of the media environment

Polukhtina Mariya Romanovna ORCID: 0009-0009-7170-8106 Head of the Educational Studio Department; Media Center; St. Petersburg State University 199034, Russia, St. Petersburg, Universitetskaya nab., 7-9 mpolukhtina@yandex.ru

Introduction

Adolescence is a crisis period of socialization of a young person. Along with significant changes in development: physical, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral, this period is accompanied by a variety of influences from social institutions and groups ^[1] – family and peers, schools, and the media environment. Adolescent personalities are unstable, their behavioral characteristics do not yet fit into the framework of cognitive development. Today, the thought attributed to Socrates is relevant: "All knowledge, separated from justice and other virtues, seems to be cheating, not wisdom" ^{[2, p. 56]}. Therefore, the problem of asynchrony of cognitive and intellectual development of schoolchildren with the development of their moral qualities, fixed in a certain value system, cannot but worry. This asynchrony is noticeable against the background of the student's cognition and desire to rationalize actions and phenomena that, first of all, must pass through "moral filters". The moral aspect pushes a person to constantly measure his actions, actions, aspirations with the ideals fixed in society. During the growing up period, teenagers try to speak, dress and behave in accordance with the behavior of the so-called stars of the media environment ^{[3, p. 86]}, social networks are actively used as the main source of information. As a result, Internet addiction develops ^{[4, p. 39],[5, p. 20]}.

The media have a direct impact on the student in the process of becoming his "I", which may be lost ^{[6, p. 997]}, on the formation of a worldview due to the fixation of broadcast images by his consciousness and confirmation of their socio-psychological benefits within the framework of solving specific life tasks. At the same time, it is not known how much the propensity of schoolchildren to assert moral norms helps them in self-sufficiency of cognitive security in the media stream of modernity.

On the one hand, it can be assumed that high school students are able to apply the principles of critical thinking, consciously striving to build their personality based on a humanistic and aesthetic perception of the world, while possessing the necessary tools for analyzing the information flow in conditions of its continuity. On the other hand, we understand how blurred the idea of media intended for children's audiences is in modern society: today, information resources of various levels and dignity are actively functioning – not only as channels of cognition and moral and ethical maturation, but also openly destructive in relation to the inner world of a teenager. Among the reasons for this state of affairs is the destruction of the integral educational system that developed in Russian pedagogy and journalistic practice throughout the twentieth century, which happened at the end of the last century.

The lack of a uniform approach to the upbringing of the younger generation cannot be considered solely as a negative phenomenon – there are elements of pluralism in it, especially appreciated by young people. They have the opportunity to freely choose their own points of application of forces, moral, ethical and aesthetic intentions.

Mindfulness plays an important role in following spiritual beliefs and values and allows a person to maintain a moral guideline based on self-knowledge ^[7]. The main criteria of moral development include such principles of moral culture as kindness, love, care, understanding, respect for others and many others. The level of such culture in society is determined by the criteria of moral education ^{[8, p. 134]}.

If we look at the problem from the point of view of psychology, we can note its relationship with personal development, which includes the emotional-sensory, mental spheres and value orientations. The sensual sphere is represented by such kind of higher feelings as moral ones: sense of duty, humanity, benevolence, love, friendship, empathy, patriotism ^{[9, p. 38]}.

The intellectual sphere is associated with thinking, which is largely influenced by technical innovations in the information space of society, which for the individual's consciousness is fraught with replacing real reality with mediatized ^{[10, p. 17]}. In this process, there is a social trend towards the massization of society, based on a sense of loneliness as a factor in expanding the practices of mass culture's impact on a person.

Experts identify a number of psychological mechanisms of a person, acting, on the one hand, as targets of influence on an individual from mass culture, on the other, indicating the possibility of self-affirmation of personality:

1. motivators of activity – ideals, inclinations, interests, needs;

2. Activity regulators – self-esteem, beliefs, worldview, beliefs, attitudes, group norms;

3. Cognitive structures – knowledge about the world and people, data on any kind of human activity;

4. operational composition of the activity – qualifications, skills, abilities, habits, style of behavior, way of thinking;

5. Mental states – emotional, functional, background, etc. ^{[11, p. 62]}.

An additional connection is provided by the mechanism of influence based on emotions and thinking, which includes such stages as infection, suggestion, imitation, persuasion ^{[10, p. 16]}.

A reference to the works of psychologists is necessary to understand the chances of a student to resist the huge flow of information, which has a special impact on the psyche and consciousness of the younger generation. The nature of the content he perceives leads to a shift in his consciousness from a broad analysis of audiovisual information exclusively to its consumption. This leads to the development of clip thinking, which, in turn, leads to a decrease in the level of critical thinking. Accordingly, we can talk about the formation of a special media culture in adolescents, narrowed in its framework ^{[12, p. 69]}.

The negative nature of such a media culture consists in the formation and consolidation of destructive states of a teenager – apathy, depression, feelings of derealization, in some cases aggressive or passive-aggressive behavior. In such a culture, a person strives for self-presentation by any means. In conditions of consumption of low-quality content that poses a threat to the information security of a teenager, the existing psychological problems are only aggravated ^{[13, p. 103]}.

V. V. Radaev outlined a number of properties of the modern generation, its problems, and also outlined the influence of media and continuous information flow on the emergence and consolidation of characteristic features of generations that develop in the same or similar environment. This demographic group is characterized by:

– the habit of questioning everything;

– blurring the boundaries of moral and immoral behavior ("restoration and legitimization of the mat");

– surface communication;

– preoccupation with gadgets;

– attention to your health;

– mental and moral "torments of choice" caused by a wide range of alternative solutions from dozens of options;

– the trend towards "freedom from adherents, authorities, from other people" ^{[14, p. 70]}.

It cannot be said that the above has a completely negative or positive effect on the formation of moral orientations of adolescents, since bringing each of these points to the extreme turns highly moral behavior into immoral. However, together all these properties do not endanger the moral and cultural values of a teenager, they rather indicate the very mobility of interpretations of moral values, the framework of which has changed before and is changing now.

Let us turn to the definition of a moral norm, which E. P. Polikanova defines as "a specific form of coordination of human freedom and will with common needs, interests, with the will and interests of other communities, other subjects" ^{[15, p. 138]}. It follows from this that the most important guideline in measuring moral norms is society and its understanding of morality at this stage of its social, economic, and cultural development.

The purpose of this study is to identify media factors influencing the formation of a teenager's personality and, at the same time, to determine the moral guidelines of schoolchildren in their interaction with media content. The research is based on an understanding of the information situation, mainly developing in the mind of the student himself.

Objects and methods of research

A special role in the formation of value orientations of schoolchildren belongs to the adolescent-oriented media system. This is not a discovery of our days, but rather a continuation of the educational practice that has developed in our country over the previous century. Therefore, we analyzed one of the bright pages of media practice that has gone down in history and found confirmation of the current understanding of the role of the media in the formation of a teenager's personality in the publications of the literary-critical and theoretical journal Television and Radio Broadcasting. For a long time, its publisher was the State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting of the USSR. It was called differently over the years, but its editorial staff always paid attention to the children's audience - radio and television editors shared stories from their practice: "An entertaining program for children", "About programs for young radio listeners", "One day in the life of a school", etc.

411 issues of the journal from 1951 to 1998 were analyzed. Special attention was paid to the articles by I. V. Dubrovitsky, Deputy editor–in-chief of the editorial office of broadcasting for children and youth of the All-Union Radio. It was he who formulated in 1956 the task of the media working for a children's audience: "not only to inform the listener of the facts, but also to educate him" ^{[16, p. 29]} with the help of literature, culture, life examples, scientific facts. All this should take place through a dialogue between peers. A good example was the issues of Pionerskaya Zorka, where at one time I. V. Dubrovitsky worked as an editor-in-chief: "There must be significant material that poses topical acute questions to listeners" ^{[17, p. 27]}.

The formation of personality and the development of values depend to a certain extent on the student's environment. Therefore, Dubrovitsky drew attention to topics that directly concern the child: "You will hear heated discussions about politics and sports news. There are endless disputes about friendship, duty, and honor" ^{[18, p. 12]}. These issues were raised in the "Pioneer Dawn", which made the transfer necessary for children.

Another program deserves special attention, which in 1970-80 was headed by I. V. Dubrovitsky – "Peers", he was its creator. In addition to two weekly broadcasts, "Peer Mail" was released every week, in which teenagers, together with mentors, read the letters of listeners and discussed. The audience was worried, for example, about such questions: "How should friends communicate?", "What should a girl do if she quarreled with a friend and she is to blame for this quarrel?".

Students turned to their "Peers" for advice when they seemed to be in a desperate situation: "I lost all interest in studying and in class life. I read in one book that laziness can ruin a person. I was afraid: why do I have such apathy, indifference to everything? Advise me what to do" ^{[19, p. 110]}. And the editorial staff helped. Through a dispute, discussion, there were ways to solve the problems faced by high school students, but no specific instructions were given. The task of the "Peers" was to guide the listener, to give him the opportunity to come to the right conclusion on his own.

For changes in the human psyche, exposure should cause cognitive dissonance, suggesting reactions such as distrust of new information, changes in behavior, rethinking of old information ^{[20, p. 52]}. The program "Peer Mail" was criticized and sometimes did not even believe in the truthfulness of the letters: "My friends believe that the letters you read are fictional. I must admit that I thought so too, but now that I have heard my own letter, I am convinced that this is not the case. I also realized that they and I were indifferent to other people's joys and sorrows. And the main thing that my friends don't like is that your show helps to get rid of many bad traits and flaws. So they get angry because they see many of these flaws in themselves, in their characters" ^{[19, p. 110]}. The authors of the program hoped that they would help the audience with their conversations. After all, who will a teenager believe faster – his peers.

That's why they heard and listened to the program, because they were given the Word that V. Yu wrote about. Merinov in relation to the media sphere: "journalism does not just put forward ideas, teaches, directs, leads, it, first of all, voices the world, gives a specific person a Word" ^{[21, p. 142]}. It is worth noting that when choosing this "specific person", the journalist, first of all, must answer the questions: What kind of person is this? What kind of actions does he do? How does he think? What values does he share? What is his background? And most importantly, what Word will he use to teach and guide society? These questions were raised in the past, and they are still relevant today.

The complexity of analyzing the moral aspects of the cognitive component of childhood and adolescence requires the development of research procedures that provide an accurate approach. It is easy to fall into banalities, into preconceived and idealized ideas about what it means to be a teenager, into attaching importance to certain concepts and social representations of adults about childhood and adolescence. Therefore, any interpretation of the results of our study should be taken with caution.

Separately, we will highlight the method used in this study to achieve the representativeness of the analysis through a special selection of focus group participants. By analogy with the differentiation of observation – included and not included, we chose the first option, which implies an invitation to participate in a focus group of "included in the process" observers who are personally interested in analyzing the surrounding student and the information space created by him. Note that in this article our reflections are based on the previously processed results of the focus group.

Thus, the opinions of the participants in the organized discussion, on the one hand, are nothing more than a reflection of the understanding of the role of media in the daily life of a young person, on the other, they represent qualified judgments that deepen the understanding of the problems of media involvement of a teenager.

Results and discussion

Let's highlight the main results of the focus group (2023), which was attended by 20 high school students of the specialized journalism class of St. Petersburg school No. 309 (12th - 10th graders, 8th - 11th graders). The status of the focus group participants is twofold – on the one hand, these are schoolchildren whose daily worries reflect the interests of most of their peers from St. Petersburg, on the other, these schoolchildren have already joined the world of media partly on an amateur, partly on a professional basis.

The study includes the following questions:

– about the interests of schoolchildren;

– on the use of media resources in the educational process;

– about the positive and negative impact of media materials;

– about values, the importance of education.

The questions, the answers to which were selected as the empirical material of this study, are divided into six thematic blocks related to the problems of ensuring cognitive security when using social networks, the Internet, and the media: awareness, fakes, viral news, the phenomenon of influence, manipulation, and limiting the flow of media data.

Further, in the responses of the respondents, the frequency of appearance of each concept in the messages was calculated, their moral value was taken into account. Then the ratio of the categories "cognitive safety" and "moral values" was calculated. This made it possible to summarize the topics and judgments often found in the messages, which included comments that absorbed a particular moral value. As a result, it was possible to form a classification of statements in the focus group:

1. Emotions:

1.1. Positive – joy, empathy, sympathy;

1.2. Negativity – despair, dislike, remorse, anger;

1.3. Unclassified – uncertainty;

2. Value judgments:

2.1. Values in the fields of social system, family, state and politics, journalism.

2.2. Values in conflict situations – interpersonal, intergroup, personality and group.

3. Behaviour:

3.1. Accepted prosocial.

3.2. Antisocial.

4. Topics: welfare and security, bureaucracy, power, national pride, inequality, bribes, truth, lies, crimes, illegality, manipulation.

The results of the focus groups were subjected to a content analysis procedure. To do this, an open coding of categories and subcategories of judgments in the respondents' responses was carried out. As a result, 180 communication patterns were obtained. Establishing a moral contrast in the choice of respondents, a number of hermeneutical contradictions were identified between equally correct positions. Thus, we systematized the relationships established between the provisions obtained from the results of theoretical analysis and the main components obtained from the application of content analysis of respondents' responses.

Summarizing the analysis of the moral aspects of cognitive safety of the use of the Internet, social networks and the media by adolescents, the study formulated five pairs of value concepts in contrast with their direct or indirect denial (See Table 1).

Table 1. Moral foundations of cognitive security

According to the study, the most common components of contradictions were "Care/Harm" (43.90%) and "Authority through antithesis/Subversive activity" (34.15%), and to a lesser extent "Objectivity/Deception" (21.95%) and "Traditional values/Value degradation" (6.10%). Analyzing statements at the poles of contradictions, we note that the positive pole in the words of schoolchildren prevails over the negative, with the exception of judgments about the facts of objectivity and deception. This can be explained by the lack of consistency in the majority of schoolchildren's ideas about morality, which is broadcast in the media and the Internet, and the lack of unambiguous assessments in relation to events broadcast in the media. In addition, during the focus group, the mention of moral concepts highlighted a large number of moral dilemmas (82.93%) present in media reports and in the real events they reflect. Nevertheless, there were almost no reviews that could somehow morally justify ethically unacceptable situations, while moral reasoning was present in almost every discussion (62.44%).

Most often, the emotions of the respondents were negative (48.78%), followed by expressions of ambiguity of assessment (14.63%), very often doubts (42.69%). This is probably due to the need to make decisions regarding the coverage of certain events, nevertheless, the respondents called the participants of the discussed events victims (23.17%) rather than provocateurs of threats (13.41%). Doubts and certain conclusions drawn on their basis mean a conscious analysis of the situations that high school students faced in the discussion.

The state and politics were also frequently mentioned (42.68%), while the family had the least presence in the discourse (29.27%). This can be explained both by the absence of negative situations within the respondents' families (hence, the absence of anxieties and uncertainties that a teenager would broadcast as part of an interview) and by the unwillingness to bring personal problems into the public field of the focus group. However, it seems that at this stage of the formation of the personality of schoolchildren, moral issues really come to the fore.

Respondents pointed mainly to the positivity of prosocial behavior: they mainly highlighted the well-being of individuals and society as a whole, security (42.68%), and in the media – the reliability of information (37.80%). There is also a high level of criticism of antisocial behavior in the judgments of schoolchildren (21%). In this aspect, the issues of moral justification of crimes based on the defense of rights and freedoms (21.95%) or overcoming inequality (9.76%) were of particular importance for schoolchildren. Of the crimes, someone was convicted of manipulating public opinion (12.20%), abuse of power (18.29%).

According to the results of the study, it should be noted that high school students have higher rates of acceptance of positive moral values than negative ones. We believe that this is due to the fact that the formation of the moral complex of the focus group participants is partly related to basic journalistic training. Students of the 309th school of St. Petersburg study in a specialized journalism class, which is supervised by the Institute "Higher School of Journalism and Mass Communications" of St. Petersburg State University. High school students tend to evaluate media content and events reflected in the media from the point of view of morality. For teenagers, the following categories are important: truth, freedom, authority, loyalty, justice, etc. We assume that following these categories can ensure the cognitive safety of schoolchildren.

Research attention is undoubtedly focused on the problems of the formation of the younger generation as a full-fledged participant in the information society. E. V. Shepeleva considers the issue of media participation in the self-determination of high school students and comes to the conclusion that this is an objective factor sufficient to solve problems related to the choice of profession ^[22].

A sufficient number of works devoted to the influence of mass media on youth belong to I. V. Zhilavskaya ^[23]. Sh. T. Ishkulova wrote in 2009 that the media is directly involved in the socialization of adolescents ^[24]. Calculations of the media consumption of digital content by young people were carried out by a group of scientists from Lomonosov Moscow State University. The results of the conducted research correlate with ours. In particular, in the works of U. A. Ushnitskaya, R. I. Egorova ^[25], N. V. Bystrova, S. V. Repina, S. O. Adamenko ^[26] the emphasis is on the study of teenagers' trust in the media. These topics are reflected in our article, but we paid the most attention to the organic combination of age, level of education and moral education, which can provide students with cognitive safety.

Conclusion

The results of the study indicate that students are aware of the threats to their safety coming from the Internet. Although teenagers have demonstrated their knowledge of measures to counter threats to cognitive security, nevertheless, their behavior and attitude to media resources still need further formation of cognitive knowledge. As a rule, students need up-to-date information as a knowledge tool to further improve the level of morality of their behavior and knowledge of the media environment, which will allow them to properly respond to already known and emerging threats to security on the Internet.

Most students are aware of the insufficiency of their own knowledge and experience to ensure information security and moral assessment of media data. This leads to the conclusion that it is necessary to develop a list of relevant measures for parents, schools and the education system aimed at increasing awareness and awareness of students about cognitive safety in the flow of Internet content.