Youth upbringing: a factor of the media environment

Schoolchildren are active users of the Internet, where they communicate, play, and interact with social network content that is not always useful for them. The flow of information disseminated in the media, including potentially unacceptable information, unhinderedly comes to the attention of the student, who, due to his age, cannot properly understand and evaluate the information situation. All this has a certain influence on the formation of his personality. The purpose of this study lies in updating the media factors influencing the formation of a teenager’s personality as an Internet user. The subject of the study is the ability to ensure the cognitive safety of young Internet users through the development of skills for assessing the meaning of media information and the formation of critical thinking in its perception. The following methods were used in the study: discussion of issues in a focus group, content analysis. In forming the composition of the focus group, we used the author’s methodology of including students from a specialized journalism class from one of the schools in St. Petersburg. The novelty of the study lies in the method used to achieve representativeness of the analysis through the special selection of focus group participants who became the object of analysis. Schoolchildren from St. Petersburg demonstrated a high level of awareness of potential threats that exist on the Internet. They also noted that their personal safety was exposed to serious risks posed by the online environment. The results of the study indicated a tendency among schoolchildren to evaluate media events from a moral point of view. For modern teenagers, the key values are truth, freedom, authority, loyalty and justice. It is important to consciously raise students' awareness of media resources and develop their critical thinking about their own experiences with information security.

internet security, cognitive development, schoolchildren, moral values, moral guidelines, high school, truth, freedom, authority, justice