Abstract:

Communicative culture is a part of the primary culture of an individual, which ensures a person’s readiness for life self-determination, the establishment of harmonious relations with his surrounding reality and within himself. It is a means of creating the inner world of the individual, the wealth of its content as well as means of solving emerging problems.

Moreover, communicative culture is knowledge, skills, and abilities in the field of organizing the interaction of people. It allows a person to establish psychological contact with colleagues and business partners, achieve accurate perception and understanding in the process of communication, predict the behaviour of other people and direct their actions to the desired result. It is highly essential to form and develop the communicative culture at different stages of a person’s education. For example, young people who study at higher education institutions are more flexible, open and eager to adapt to the “right” communicative culture which will further help them socialize smoothly in different life and professional circumstances.

Therefore, this research aims at perceiving and analyzing how young people’s communicative culture is being developed at the stage of university training at present at the age of new media technologies. The key focus of this study is the shaping of young individuals’ communicative culture under the effect of the new media discourse space. Nowadays, it comes as no surprise that modern media discourse is a particular potential source of social support and powerful identity resource for the younger generation. Around the world, young people’s new media cultural practices also mix the local and global in very creative ways.

Thus, since the new media discourse space is a powerful “trigger” in transforming young people’s lives, then we hypothesize that the present-day media discourse may have a profound impact on the development of the university students’ communicative culture. This research has introduced several special surveys and interviewed Russian university students to comprehend how far the actual media discourse space may change young people’s communicative culture. It also analyzes whether this transformation brings a more positive or negative effect on a young person’s further life and a professional career.

The results of the present study may be applied by college and university lecturers and tutors in an academic and educational process. They may help them raise or shape their students’ communicative culture level and guide young people in their search for self-identity and professional formation and development.

Keywords:

University students, communicative culture, media discourse space, self-identity, professional development, higher education institution.