Children's subculture as a socio-cultural context of socialization of the 21st-century younger generation: Semiotics and Phenomenology

The article presents an interdisciplinary approach to studying one of the most prominent social phenomena – children's subculture. The study explores its sociological, cultural, psychological and pedagogical aspects. The authors review the substantiation of culture stratification in various scientific schools, conceptualize the terms subculture and counterculture, define the term children's subculture, the first in ontogenesis, as self-organizing according to the principle of age stratification. The concept of subculture unites the semantic space of values and attitudes, ways of activity and forms of communication, which are realized at a certain historical stage of society development in children's communities and through them. As children are included in the society of peers, children's subculture performs the most important function of socialization and contributes to the formation of the personality. Being a part of general culture, the culture of childhood is also subject to transformations under the influence of changes in public life. The research highlights the factors of ongoing transformations and analyzes the consequences of such influences on the process of the child's socialization and on personality development. Such phenomena as terrorism, ecological and man-made disasters, global digitalization, and gamification are among these psychogenic factors. The authors illustrate the figurative representation of the subcultural fields of preschool childhood through statistical data on the availability of the Internet network to preschool-age users and their ranking of preferred, significant characters in animated films. According to the authors (2023), children are active internet users even at preschool age: 59% of children aged 4–5 and 74% of children aged 6–8 use the internet independently. Media products draw children into a fantasy world populated by heavily propagated images of ideal beauty or strength. They select a universal character or group of characters as an object of identification, around which, under certain conditions, an active subcultural space is formed. The article visualizes the process of formation and categorization of ideas about good and evil in preschool childhood. The authors provide research results that show that the impact of media content, in particular animation and cinematographic products, on the mental development and health of children is not always positive. Cartoon and cinematic characters that are significant for modern children can demonstrate value milestones and social beliefs that differ significantly from the norms and standards declared by the humanistic paradigm. In the context of social acceleration, preschool children's interest in ambiguous media personalities, internet communities, pop culture figures, and bloggers poses risks to their personal development and may cause distorted worldview formation. However, due to the conservatism of the children's subculture, which has its own censorship filters, the authors remain hopeful that the variety of characters that exist today is the basis for a wide repertoire of diverse modes of action and behaviors that a child can master in the game and successfully apply in real life.