On the Creation of the National Identity of Russian Youth in the Digital Age

The article analyzes the specifics and the main problematic aspects of the national-civic identity design of youth in the new-digital-era. The author pays special attention to such factors of the identifi-cational transformation of the mass consciousness of young Russians as change in the communicative landscape of Russian society, a comprehensive "Internetization" of sociopolitical practices, and the cultural and psychological effects associated with it. Among the problems associated with the construction of the national-civic identity of modern Russian youth, the author identifies the weakness of the cognitive and symbolic foundation of the civic self-identification of young Russians, the dominance of fragmentary, rather than holistic, ideas about Russian history as particularly significant. An equally significant problem is the vague temporal frames of the "image of us", the amorphousness and poor cognitive content of the "image of a collective future". In the political consciousness of Russian youth, this image is usually extremely amorphous and often contains depressive elements. At the same time, the lack of the image of a nationwide future enhances the feeling of sociopolitical deprivation, reduces the motivation for positive political participation, and provokes protest moods among young people. Another significant problem of the national-civic self-identification of Russian youth is also related to the specifics of information consumption in the digital era. It is rooted in the fact that youth as a whole, especially representatives of Generation Z, have a predominantly mosaic political consciousness, which is based on the unwillingness to perceive cognitively complex constructs and on the orientation to the emotional component of political reality perception. It is important to note that the older Russian youth-representatives of Generation Y-are less affected by simulated reality. At the same time, "digital natives"-representatives of Generation Z-are at the epicenter of the formation of a "virtual" political reality, in which the traditional tools of civil socialization lose their effectiveness.

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