SOCIAL SURFING: SPECIFIC VALUE ORIENTATIONS OF YOUTH IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
The article describes social surfing as a new phenomenon, spreading very fast among the young people of the Russian society. This phenomenon finds its expression in superficial and diverse identifications of the youth with social communities. The results of the study, featuring value orientations of the youth (n = 568 respondents), were obtained with the help of the values questionnaire by S.H. Schwartz. It was found that among most of the respondents there was a significant discrepancy between the declared and real values which regulate individual behavior. This discrepancy is caused by an urgent need for security among various social communities and the lack of deep personal involvement in human social interaction, and by a focus on diversity of communication, which is superficial in its character. All this is brought about by the situation when classical social institutes have to a great extent lost their influence, when a person is no longer firmly attached to traditional communities such as family, confession and nation and loses touch with a concrete territory (region, town or country). In the global information environment a young person tries to become part of numerous social and cultural modifications and be “everywhere”. Traditional institutional forms are being replaced by communities of a new type which are characterized by lack of rigid ties: they are discrete, polimorphemic, open and always uncompleted. Post-traditional forms of interaction give young people a chance to easily pass from one community to another, to switch from one channel of communication to a different one and to search for and acquire various cultural practices. Man can easily become part of a social location by following only most evident ways of practice, by playing a fleeting game of “being somebody”, by presenting himself as a possible member.