Civiс Consciousness of the Russian Youth and the Mediaspace: 'Unsolvable Puzzle'

The article is devoted to the formation features of the civic consciousness among the youth in mass culture and media communications. Civil self-consciousness is represented through a system of personal values, a person's ideas about himself as a citizen, as well as about the state and society where he belongs and in relation to which he is self-determined. The purpose of the article is to present how the youth consumes the mass culture products and socio-political media content in the context of the formation process of their civic consciousness. The design of an empirical study is based on the principles of a political and psychological approach. The empirical basis of the research is the materials of the All-Russian survey of the youth aged 18 to 30 years, conducted in 2020 using the formalized interview procedure (n = 1600) and the in-depth interview method (n = 200), as well as the materials of the expert survey (n = 20). The materials reveal attitudes of the youth to printed publications, television content, Internet resources, film products, fiction, musical compositions, perception characteristics of the presented socio-political information. The character of media consumption among the youth is determined by the values of freedom and autonomy, justice, truth and truthfulness, and trust in information sources that are significant for them. The lack of critical thinking skills necessary for processing and analyzing a huge array of information determines their primitive perception of the political, the inability to identify political plots and political problems presented in the works of mass culture, a high degree of reactivity to the appearance of various media products. The civic consciousness formation of the youth becomes “broken” and fragmented under the influence of the media space as a factor of political socialization.