Abstract:

The Internet opens the access to media offers that can be individually formed more than other mass media, so we must wonder how to learn new individual methods of dealing with media offers and whether the altered media forms affect the processes of media socialization. These possible impacts will further be viewed as forms of self-socialization.
The concept of self-socialization can be put into various contexts of previous studies of socialization, if it is, as always, aimed at the independence of subjects. Socialization theories can be distinguished by the way in which they measure the aspects of self-socialization and socialization that is realized by some other person (teacher, parent, peers). The more we adopt direct external possibilities of impact, instructions and intervention on subject, the more processes of socialization realized by another person are emphasized. In contrast to this, the more we emphasize the processes of self-organization, self-regularization and self-constructiveness, the more we have the aspects of self-socialization in mind.
Relationship between self-socialization and the use of media, i.e. media competence, is not new, and in the broad field of examining the mass communication it is described and discussed in detail. The subjects are not, as various studies oriented towards reception show, passively and helplessly left to media impacts, but they independently handle media offers. This aspect of media socialization could be performed step by step, according to studies of the media aimed at media coercion and effects.
Precisely in the field of socialization in dealing with the new media, we can now indicate to the fact that new generations are increasingly being left to themselves and, therefore, they have been socializing on their own. The use of media as self-socialization, means that those who are socialized, they manage the choice of media and media content, relatively autonomously decide on time and place of accessing the media and independently construct the meaning of media content in reception process, which is also reflected by independent development of meaning. This also refers to the aspect of interactivity of the new media, i.e. individual disposition with media content. From this it follows that: possibility of intervention and organization for users increases the autonomy in handing the media. Unlike the older, as it is frequently said, the younger generation claims more value to determining, all by itself, which media content, when and in what form it will handle.
The new media set the task to media pedagogy to think about assumptions, processes and terms of adopting media competence. That could happen through the discussion about the relationship between interactivity of new media and self-socialization.

Keywords:

New media, self-socialization, media pedagogy, media competence, Internet.