The Influence Of Virtual Environment On College Students’ Growth And The Countermeasures

The visual environment in this paper refers to the objective change of mass medium selectively indicating reality, which leads to a symbolic and informational environment as what we call the Media Environment. Nowadays, mass medium, such as newspapers, TVs, broadcasting and the Internet, are flourishing. Meanwhile, the visual environment brought by the mass medium, with its particular advantages and strong penetration, delivers multifarious information to people, changes our value and the way of thinking and living, which influences our everyday life significantly.Contemporary college students have grown up with TVs and the Internet. Their knowledge of the world is derived from the mass medium, which makes them the major audience of the visual environment. Their opinions, thinking modes and actions are widely influenced by the visual environment. Thoroughly understanding and accurately mastering the visual environment’s influence on college students in order to make full use of its positive influence and overcome the negative impact, is a major subject for the ideological and political educational theories and practices. is an important subject of the current college students’theoretical research and practical activities on ideological and political education.This paper is a preliminary study in this field. Besides the introduction, it has three parts. Part Ⅰ explains the definition and characteristics of the visual environment. The author lists four characteristics of the visual environment from four aspects. Firstly, from the aspect of how it has formed, the visual environment is highly manmade. Secondly, from the aspect of its nature, the visual environment is a world of opinions. Thirdly, from the aspect of its mechanism, the visual environment is the result of the mass medium restructuring. Fourthly, from the aspect of its content, the visual environment reflects the reality selectively. Part Ⅱ analyzes the visual environment’s influence on college students’ development. The author finds that the visual environment has both positive and negative influence on college students. The positive factors are:improving college students’ ideological and moral qualities by spreading the mainstream cultures; satisfying college students’ demands and encouraging them to be socialized; enlivening college students’life and promoting their spiritual life. The negative factors are:the complicated visual environment may make college students’ life turn to be vulgar; the unhealthy information of the visual environment causes college students’ misbehaviors; the intricate visual environment challenges college students’ ideological and political education. Part Ⅲ raises suggestions to optimize the visual environment and promote the healthy development of the college students, including:enhancing legislation to build a sound management system of mass medium; strengthening the management of mass medium to improve the effectiveness of spreading information; integrating the ideological and political education in the visual environment to play its educational role; cultivating college students’media literacy to enable them to be positively influenced by the visual environment and overcome the negative factors.