Development Of Cultural Self-consciousness By New Media Individual Users

As communication technology is developed and new media is widely applied, people’s presence status and way of communication have been revolutionarily changed. Interactivity, such a typical characteristic in new media, offers people “equal” rights to actively receive and communicate in new media activities. In the free communication environment, gradually people transfer their position from audiences in mass media period to new media users that own four rights (right to know, right to participate, right to express and right to supervise). The initiative process is characterized by interactivity and initiative, and it optimizes relationship between information senders continuously; the cultural sources, forms and ideas are inevitably diversified due to objective differences in new media individual users’ presence status, social practices, cultural background, subjective demands and mental level. Cultural self-consciousness is defined as “self-knowledge” on culture from people living in a certain cultural environment, namely their ability to identify, compare, reflect, criticize, select and innovate in face of multicultural communication, Meanwhile, the cultural consciousness is considered as an arduous process where people not only need to understand their own culture, and also are required to understand such the multi-culture, thus to establish an independent ability and learn from others’ strong points to offset their weakness, finally achieve common cultural development and innovation, and even cultural integration. Generally, cultural communication via new media targets at cultural heritage and innovation, social civilization progress and overall development of human, and aims to construct a multi-cultural platform for individual users where they are able to express their views freely, and take what they need, thus helps them develop cultural self-consciousness during cultural participation and interaction activities. Therefore, the paper considers how to develop cultural self-consciousness of individual users of new media is one of important tasks of people under the background of “digital subsistence”, and it is a critical premise for cultivating cultural awareness, attitudes and practices in face of complex situation of new media. For the purpose, the author firstly makes surveys on the concepts of new media, cultural self-consciousness and individual users, as well as theoretical origin and development status, and makes macro analysis on new platform for cultural communication via new media, which not only develops, innovates and integrates multi-culture, but also causes a series of communication dilemma between mainstream culture and marginal culture, elite culture and grassroots culture, lack of introspection in cultural development and dissimilation risk in innovation process, and then the paper analyzes current situation of individual users’ cultural self-consciousness from three views: cultural awareness, cultural attitude and cultural practices. Finally, the paper emphasizes theoretical and practical values of developing new media individual users’ cultural self-consciousness; theoretically, cultural self-consciousness is to achieve a communication objective “take what you need, help others to take what they need, and share all on the earth for the same dream”; from a practical view, through cultural self-consciousness, individual users should be able to show rational awareness, attitude, and practice; to promote cultural prosperity, social civilization progress and human comprehensive development. In addition, the paper describes how individual users develop cultural self-consciousness from three views respectively: rational attitude towards cultural communication, humanized cultural production platform and scientific communication methods&techniques. Cultural self-consciousness is an arduous process, and development of cultural self-consciousness of individual users is also a step-by-step process. Individual users shall develop their cultural self-consciousness throughout the whole practice process.