Abstract:

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.

To prove our working hypothesis a special students’ survey was developed and conducted. The survey included the responses of bachelor’s and master’s students. They were asked to evaluate the degree of the perceived information credibility, their favourite media genres they frequently refer to; a positive and negative impact of present-day media environment on the younger generation and on their academic and professional future; foreign languages and cultural knowledge as well as the role of new media genres in their acquisition; the students’ ability to interact with a foreign media environment, reading and leaving comments about different events in the Russian and foreign new media.

Therefore, we established the correlation between the various types of variables which compose the system of the digital media environment, the variety of new media genres functioning in it and the university students’ multiple reactions to their comprehension of the new media genre forms terms of their professionalization stages. The key influencing factors which stand for university students’ choice of the media genre forms in the virtual space were defined.

The main conclusions about the extent of the new media genres influence (or its absence) on bachelor’s and master’s students and their professional and academic development were drawn in the research.

References:
[1] K.P. Vuković, New Media Genres and Their Reception. Retrieved from http://www.visual-studies.com/projects/vcnm_media_genres.html.

Keywords:

University students, new media genre, new media environment, genre evolution, professional development, professional self-concept.