Be wary of youth aesthetic alienation in the Internet age

Marx pointed out: "The progress of society is the crystallization of man's pursuit of beauty. "The aesthetic attitudes, aesthetic standards and aesthetic ideals of young people reflect the aesthetic tastes and aesthetic needs of a country or nation, and reflect the degree of development and progress of spiritual civilization in the whole society." The phenomenon of youth aesthetic alienation in the Internet age has sounded the alarm bell.

The network mimetic environment promotes aesthetic alienation. Landscape is an extension of vision and consciousness, and the landscape presented by any society is a combination of its aesthetic and cultural. Aesthetics are embodied in the landscape, while culture is contained in the landscape. Behind the aesthetic alienation of contemporary youth in China is the rendering and amplification of false landscapes by the network communication media. Young aesthetic objects, aesthetic methods, and aesthetic concepts present a virtualized, superficial, and entertaining alienation trend in the "mimetic environment" constructed by the media.

First, online consumption culture has spawned the alienation of aesthetic objects. Online consumption culture is a cultural form that takes the network as the carrier and platform, takes digital symbols or virtual objects constructed by digital as the consumption object, in order to fully meet people's consumption needs in information search, reading and vision, leisure and entertainment, shopping and exchange, and many other aspects. Compared with the traditional aesthetics of flowers, birds, fishes and insects, mountains and rivers and other elegant, natural, and other unworldly things as aesthetic objects, fast-paced consumer culture can better cater to the aesthetic tastes of young people, and various pictorial, pictorial and fragmented sensory stimulation information in the virtual world brings pleasure to young people. The media platform is in line with the curiosity of young audiences, producing a large number of repetitive, fast consumption, short and fast content to achieve the purpose of rushing traffic and eyeballs, and aesthetic objects are alienated. In this process, young people gradually lose their aesthetic ability, and when they come into contact with aesthetic objects or works of art that require deep thinking, they often have no interest in in-depth understanding.

Second, the iteration of network technology has spawned aesthetic alienation. Advances in technology have made people's aesthetics entertaining and passive. On the one hand, with the rise of short video apps such as Kuaishou and Douyin, the social pan-entertainment trend of entertainment supremacy and audience carnival has been hyped up, aesthetic tastes and value orientation have shown a superficial and vulgar trend, and people no longer "contemplate" art as before, but turn to "stream view" or "pastime". Sensory information impacts the aesthetic perception of young people, from the relatively eternal and static aesthetic of traditional aesthetics to the instantaneous, popular aesthetic aesthetics, from the aesthetic spiritual pleasure full of philosophy and non-utilitarian nature to the hedonistic supremacy and the loss of the aesthetic spirit full of materialism. Instrumental rationality, on the other hand, drives away the internal logic of aesthetic judgment. Information intelligence technology makes the aesthetic judgment process become automated and simplified, in the past need to use the mind to think, with the eyes to see, with the hands to touch the goods, today only need to scan the two-dimensional code, find keywords, read the comments can get the expected results, aesthetic judgment invisibly lost. After the mature application of big data technology, the network platform is accurately pushed according to the user's aesthetic orientation, the aesthetic judgment process of the aesthetic subject is partially replaced by the machine, the aesthetic method is passively turned to the human-machine interconstruction, and the opportunity for independent selection of aesthetic objects is greatly reduced. In this process, young people are likely to fall into the cocoon of aesthetic information, and aesthetic consciousness is gradually deprived by technology.

Third, the open environment of Internet information has spawned the alienation of aesthetic concepts. Culture itself is determined by the message and content of the medium. Whether it is the memory of the times condensed by radio and television in the era of electronic media, or the popular information disseminated in Weibo and WeChat in the era of online media, it reflects the influence and construction of the media on the culture of daily life and people's values. The open and inclusive environment of the Internet provides a field for the dissemination of diverse and non-mainstream cultures, constantly squeezing and eroding the space of mainstream culture, so that young people who lack self-control and judgment deviate from the mainstream value orientation and form non-mainstream aesthetic inertia. Taking contemporary college students as an example, they pay little attention to the situation, policies, and international political situation, and they cherish the gossip and anecdotes of celebrities; they are obsessed with and admired and flock to hedonism and money-worship, and they respect collectivism and patriotism and avoid talking about it; they take entertainment enjoyment and nihilistic values as evaluation criteria, and take "spoofing", "joking" and "deconstruction" of classic culture and heroic figures as aesthetic tastes, replacing aesthetics with ugliness, and reducing the pursuit of value. Aesthetic superficiality and entertainment are gradually internalized into the conscious behavior of young people, and eventually deviate from the correct trajectory of physical and mental development.

Dissolve alienated aesthetics and reshape the aesthetic values of young people. From the perspective of personal aesthetics, the dissolution of aesthetic alienation is an important way to enhance the level of personal aesthetics and promote the all-round development of individuals; from the perspective of social development, aesthetic concepts can only promote the harmonious progress of society and culture if they consciously synchronize with the practical process of socialist spiritual civilization construction and develop in harmony with mainstream values. The media disseminates information, the information carries culture, and culture shapes aesthetics. Online aesthetic culture governance is imperative.

Deepen school aesthetic education guided by Marxist aesthetics. We must solidly implement the overall requirements of General Secretary Xi Jinping for school aesthetic education at the National Education Conference, adhere to the aesthetic education of people with beauty and culture, and continuously improve students' aesthetic and humanistic qualities. First, we must exert efforts on students' emotional experience, starting from aesthetic needs and aesthetic interests, facing the real world, respecting the group characteristics and group psychology of young students, extending the aesthetic taste of educational objects in the form of "high and harmonious", and stimulating the deep emotional identification of educational objects with "truth, goodness and beauty" in aesthetic experience. Second, it is necessary to integrate the spirit of Chinese aesthetic education into aesthetic education, take the Chinese aesthetic education spirit as the root system, and use traditional art carriers such as "poetry and song endowment" and "piano, chess, calligraphy and painting" to guide students to deeply understand the traditional aesthetic education spirit such as "ritual music indoctrination", "neutralization", "knowledge of grid objects", "beauty and commonality", and identify beautiful things. Third, to enrich the forms and means of aesthetic education, aesthetic education teachers should reconsider the strategies, means and materials of aesthetic education in combination with the complexity of the online world, so that students can recognize aesthetic culture from multi-angle and multi-disciplinary and multi-scene learning, and enhance the ability to feel, appreciate and create beauty.

Create a social atmosphere led by mainstream aesthetic culture. First, we must actively give play to the online aesthetic governance function of mainstream media, promote an upward and benevolent aesthetic culture, and highlight the mainstream aesthetic value. Second, we must attach importance to the role of family aesthetic culture in shaping young people's aesthetic ideals and aesthetic personalities, do a good job in social publicity, and improve the aesthetic taste and aesthetic style of social members with the family as a unit, so that the family can become a solid backing for the governance of online aesthetic culture. Third, we must continue to improve the construction of the moral legal system in cyberspace, establish and improve the laws and regulations for the construction of Internet spiritual civilization, strengthen the moral constraints and social responsibility of media enterprises and online media practitioners, and let the "spectacle of differential reward" and "humiliation" no longer consume the aesthetic cultural subjects of the new era. Fourth, it is necessary to form a network supervision mechanism, control and sanction media platforms, APPS, and portals that maliciously spread the three traditional cultures, purify the network ecology, and create a clear network environment for young people to form correct aesthetic values.

Encourage and guide the self-improvement of young people's aesthetic literacy. The improvement of personal aesthetic quality can also dissolve aesthetic alienation to a certain extent. First of all, encourage young people to give full play to their subjective initiative, consciously pay attention to the improvement of individual aesthetic personality and aesthetic literacy, enhance their self-awareness when the wind of new media homogenization strikes, refuse to follow the trend of the Internet, actively participate in healthy aesthetic practice activities, accumulate aesthetic perceptual experience, and promote exchanges and dialogues between individuals and aesthetics. Secondly, guide young people to consciously resist the temptation of aesthetic economic development, take the initiative to identify aesthetic activities that are entertained, shallow and commercialized by the market, refuse to accept all kinds of pornography, horror, spoofs and other alternative aesthetic feast content, resist vulgar and bad aesthetic tastes, devote themselves to the real aesthetic cultural trend, and resolutely oppose aesthetic excessive consumption behavior and the tendency of hunting and secularization. Third, encourage young people to actively participate in the creation of cultural aesthetic products, cultivate aesthetic creativity, give play to aesthetic imagination, inherit excellent aesthetic culture, innovate on the basis of the essence of the original culture, give promotion and financial support to outstanding literary and creative works, and dissolve aesthetic alienation in the process of the continuation of Chinese aesthetic civilization in which the majority of young people consciously and voluntarily exert their efforts.

(The author is a doctoral candidate at the School of Marxism, Nankai University)