YOUTH SUBCULTURES AS A PHENOMENON OF MODERN SOCIETY

Abstract

Іntroduction. Modern society is characterized by pluralistic, often multi-directional and contradictory influences on a person. These influences, when offering a broad horizon of freedom to a person, can complicate the processes of his spiritual self-determination. Freedom implies responsibility for choosing one’s life path. The wrong choice or the inability or unwillingness to make it is accompanied by the loss of life sense and the emergence of an existential vacuum. At a young age, the crisis of value self-awareness is accompanied by the search for one’s own comfortable environment, a certain community of people. Alternatively, the youth subcultures can be such an environment that reproducing the attributes of group belonging forms the axiological basis of a young person’s life position. Which is why the study of the phenomenon of youth subcultures is relevant to understand the patterns and main trends of the axiological sphere of modern youth.

Purpose is to analyze the phenomenon of youth subculture in the context of spiritual situation and civilizational influences of modern society.

Methods. We have applied a number of philosophical and general scientific methods. In particular, cultural and historical method, retrospective analysis method, comparative analysis method, etc.

Results. The reception of the phenomenon of youth subcultures in the context of the spiritual situation of modern society has identified the main “challenges” among which are the individualization and atomization of society; distribution of simulated data flows against the background of development of communication technologies; the domination of consumerism. The consequence of these influences is a value vacuum, or the loss of much of the youth before the multivariate value and pseudo-value paradigms. Hence the leveling of fundamental spiritual values: Good, Truth, Beauty and their replacement with fake values. Alternatively, young people choose several options for attending to the actual axiological paradigms of modern society: their conscious or unconscious perception (conformism); moderate critical position, which is transmitted by subcultural entities; conscious rejection and protest (non-conformism) demonstrated by counter-cultural entities. Anthropological and psychological factors in the formation of youth subcultures are a number of age-old problems, which are catastrophically perceived against the background of constant social strife. As a consequence, there is a desire to create one’s own value system and to belong to a specific community of people who would share these intentions. The positive effects of youth subcultures include: a focus on communication with peers, a desire for self-expression in working together with others. The negative factors of subcultures include the following: nihilistic moods, outrageous behavior, desire to taste the “forbidden fruit” of modern civilization, etc.

Originality. It is justified that youth subcultures, while demonstrating a certain protest position, are a compromise between the paradigms of mass culture and counterculture. As natural social phenomena, they perform axiological, integrative, psychotherapeutic and other functions. 

Сonclusions. Significant adaptive potential of youth subcultures, which serve as a means of amortizing the conflict between the value paradigms of a large part of the younger generation and the “suggestions” of mass culture, has been identified. The prospects for further research are to deepen the study of the adaptation and amortization potential of youth subcultures in the context of incipience of a post-modern society.