PSYCHOLOGICAL ATTITUDE AS A POWERFUL NEW MEDIA DISCOURSE INSTRUMENT AND ITS IMPACT ON YOUNG PEOPLE'S CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE DIGITAL AGE

A modern media discourse of the XXIst century must be considered as the basis of human life in the era of digitalization of culture. The media discourse of the third millennium is a basic social institution that sets the vector for the development of social and individual consciousness, which determines the human mindset and behaviour. "Any social phenomena are determined by media discourse practices" [1]. This wide range of media discourse features is possible, due to individual and public consciousness, which is actively involved in building a media discourse, sharing media content and actively interacting in the media discourse space. The participants of the media discourse (or the media actors) set various psychological attitudes in their information exchange that contribute to the dissemination and popularization of certain ideas, opinions, events that can have a strong psychological impact on people at the local and global levels. Attitude is a willingness, a predisposition to perceive, understand, comprehend an object or act with it in a certain way, formed in experience [2]. A media discourse created in the media space with the right psychological attitude and a formulated goal, oriented to the selected audience of recipients, can have a strong impact on the cognitive, affective and behavioural spheres of the individual's consciousness of the information message. The purpose of this research is to analyze the phenomenon of the psychological attitude and how it may affect the development of human consciousness and, in particular, the young people's consciousness and their worldview. We focus on studying this specific age group because we hypothesize that the youth is the most sensitive towards the media discourse exposure and different psychological attitudes may be perceived by young individuals especially sharply. To estimate the working hypothesis several surveys were developed and conducted. We interviewed Russian university students aged 19 - 24 to analyze the correlation between their interaction with the new media discourse and various psychological attitudes perceived on different events, people and news. Factor analysis helped us to understand the inner reasons why young people may respond to a certain piece of information in the media discourse and completely ignore another one. Finally, conclusions were made about the importance to continue studying the problem of psychological attitudes in the present-day media discourse because it may help to tackle such social issues as teenagers' suicide, colour revolutions and rebellions across the world, terrorists' attacks and other important questions related to the life in the digital society of the XXIst century.