Conditions of an Efficient Dialogue with the Contemporary Youth
Conditions of an Efficient Dialogue with the Contemporary Youth

Summary/Abstract: The author evokes and provides a brief description of the contemporary young person’s digital habitat. He finds the youth as digital natives spending most of their time online. What results from it is devolution or incapacitation within the scope of other communicative capabilities and entering into a passage of dysfunctions pertaining to the lack of sufficient social competences. Along with the deepening deficiencies within the said scope, the youth seem to compensate for it by exaggerated expression on the Web, particularly in the social networking activity. Overburdened by the stimuli coming from the digital world, the young people wind up lost in the real one. Therefore, it is necessary to find an adequate way of re-establishing a permanent contact with them. Aside from the above mentioned competition with the new technologies, there arises also a necessity to fight for perpetuating values and morals. The author further reveals and exemplifies the new threatening phenomena originating on the Internet. They included carelessness and pure ignorance within the scope of language usage, the “hating” (online scapegoating) mechanisms, and devastating the tenderness, intimacy and privacy of other human being; the author concludes with presenting the phenomenon of sexting. Each of the enumerated phenomena repress the hitherto values and norms with brutality and impetus of a waterfall. It not only traumatizes an individual, but also affects the community that is helpless in the face of such a behaviour. The latter helplessness stems, on the one hand, directly from the characteristics of desacralized world, which are ruthlessness, brutality and pugnaciousness. On the other hand, however, it results from inaptitude of the “guardians of the old normative order”, for they lack adequate and compatible communication devices and capabilities to use them. One may assume that dehumanization and desacralization of our every-day living space shall inevitably dominate us, that there is no escaping from this cultural tendencies. The author nonetheless puts forward a very precise remedies, that is, strategies of “not abandoning the trenches of values,” which are priceless from the universal viewpoint are have to be protected.

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