The “MacDonaldization” of Russian adolescent: Effect of social media

Alek­san­dr V. Shcheko­tur­ov
Immanuel Kant Baltic Fed­er­al Uni­ver­si­ty

The “Mac­Donaldiza­tion” of Russ­ian ado­les­cent: Effect of social media

Abstract. The arti­cle focus­es on a crit­i­cal rethink­ing of the role and place of social media in the design of vir­tu­al spaces. Con­sid­er­ing social media as part of a con­sumer soci­ety sys­tem, the author aims to deter­mine their social­iz­ing poten­tial in con­text of teens’ vir­tu­al dai­ly lives. The research bases on the data from a cor­pus of domes­tic stud­ies of ado­les­cents’ behav­iors on the Inter­net. George Ritzer’s con­cept of the McDonaldiza­tion of soci­ety serves a the­o­ret­i­cal frame­work that enables to expli­cate the prac­tices of using social media in con­di­tions of an emerg­ing con­sumer soci­ety. The study shows that the “Mac­Donaldized” influ­ence of social media is char­ac­ter­ized by encour­ag­ing the cre­ation of tem­plate vir­tu­al self-pre­sen­ta­tions, sim­pli­fy­ing vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tions, trans­fer­ring some forms of human rela­tions to vir­tu­al dimen­sions and elim­i­nat­ing their val­ue (for exam­ple, net-friend­ship), as well as trans-form­ing the mech­a­nisms of pub­lic recog­ni­tion. The author sug­gests an assump­tion that the influ­ence of social media, on the one hand, encour­ages skills in younger gen­er­a­tions to search out net­work resources and net­work solu­tions; how­ev­er, on the oth­er hand, it restricts a cre­ative view of a teenag­er encour­ag­ing the cre­ation of new forms or design­er finds by cop­ing what some­one has already sug­gest­ed.

Key­words: McDonaldiza­tion of soci­ety, social media, teenag­er, self-pre­sen­ta­tion, vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion, net-friend­ship

DOI: 10.5840/dspl20192116

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