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

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 transforming 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.