FEATURES OF THINKING OF THE NET GENERATION

Abstract

The changes of thinking forming in the digital world conditions, in which human activity is largely mediated by information and computer technologies are discussed in the article, and also discusses some of the consequences of thinking changes in such conditions. Thinking is considered as a mental tool of a person as an open system that determines the selection of significant/insignificant from the environment. The pseudopathopsychological phenomena of thinking (PPF) identified in the research, which are considered as a changed ratio of signs and values are described. The data on the prevalence of PPF in young people studying various specialties of higher education are given. It is shown that the thinking of respondents belonging to the “digital generation” is significantly different from the thinking of people who forced the pre-digital era. The increasing of the number and variability of PPF is considered to be a consequence of changes in thinking, based, in particular, on the system of selection of significant/insignificant. It is established that the thinking of representatives of the pre-digital era is based on the use of a generally accepted hierarchy of anthropocentrically organized generic and specific characteristics of concepts and terms. This hierarchy of generic/specific features with a certain measure of concrete/abstract is the basis of the “filtration” of concepts/phenomena of the surrounding world, which explains its usage in the lists of diagnostic standards of clinical psychology and classical criteria for the interpretation of the results of pathopsychological methods. At the same time, the principle thinking`s organization of the digital generation` representatives is graphically more correlated with the form of the network than with the hierarchy, with the placement of equal-order generic/species characteristics and properties in the vertices of the graph. This modified version of thinking is characterized by flexibility, volume, ambiguity, with a high variability of measures of the ratio of signs and values in the degree of abstractness/specificity. The system of estimation according to which signs are perceived by respondents as a hyperlink is offered, the new signs are built up over these signs, and values are built up on them.