Influence of the digital environment on the socialization of digital natives

The article considers the digital environment as a factor in the process of socialization of the younger generation. The article is aimed at identifying the features of digital culture that can contribute to or hinder the creative fulfilment of young people. The study of these features allows us to assess the possibility to form a forecast of the impressing impact of digital resources on the personality of a teenager. Based on an analysis of the empirical research, we have identified the characteristics of the digital environment, which the representatives of the digital generation distinguish as practical and valuable and which can create impressing situations. It has been shown that the obstacle to the influence of digital resources on the creative self-actualization of a teenager is the situation of uncertainty of the digital environment, due to its hypertextuality, which is characterized by non-linearity, interactivity, dynamism, uncertainty of the author and user, asynchrony. We have noted that another objective obstacle to self-actualization in the digital space is digital inequality, in particular, inequality in access to modern equipment and high-quality communications. Nevertheless, the digital environment has the possibilities of a specific impact on users, such as the design of digital resources, the technologies for collecting “big data” that allow personalizing the proposed content, the “network effect”, the features of network communication. It is concluded that digital technologies are only tools, and not a factor determining the creative development of a person.