NEW MEDIA GENRES AND THEIR IMPACT ON THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN THE MODERN DIGITAL EPOCH

Modern university students spend a lot of time in the media space by looking for different kinds of information including their academic and professional issues. This information placed in the virtual environment belongs to various digital-networked genres which are populating the literary, the visual and the communicational, redefining the traditional media which are undergoing a process of remediation and cultural transcoding ([1]). The concept of media genre has recently become extremely important in many sciences (e.g. game studies, library and information science, film and media studies, applied linguistics, rhetoric, literature, and elsewhere). Understood as social recognitions that embed histories, ideologies, and contradictions, genres function as recurrent social actions, helping to constitute human culture and self-perception. A genre, being a relatively stable and expectable form of communication, is addressed to particular communities and fit into particular activities in the lives of that community's members. It is common knowledge that people perceive and analyze information through the prism of genre forms. Moreover, the genre forms introduce various pragmatic attitudes that allow the media to develop and shape necessary ideas, views and public opinions for their audience. Because genres are dynamic sites of tension between stability and change, they are also sites of inventive potential. Thus, taking into account the important role of the genre and its emerging and digitizing nature at the present moment, we hypothesize that today's new media genres make a big impact on university students' professional development and their academic success while studying at the university.