Media discourse of youth subculture as a sociocultural phenomenon (based on runet sources)

The concept of media discourse allows us to classify the speech behavior in social media as an indicator of the social and discursive practices of the subject. Based on the examples of communication from the social network Vkontakte as well as contemporary dictionaries, the empirical corpus of word usage (words and phrases) has been established, enabling interpretation of values of a modern young person and identifying interests specific to various subcultures. An interdisciplinary approach to the topic allows us to take into account the controversy of the definition of “subculture”, which may conflict with the concept of “counterculture” as well as experience certain difficulties in interpretation once the legal and axiological aspects of the topic are merged. Internet slang can be understood as a manifestation of the diversity of youth identities. The analyzed linguistic data point to a contradictory social portrait of young people, which corresponds to the contradictory assessment of Generation Z as a whole - the youths bearing mutually exclusive attributes.