The Role of Mass and Social Media in Building National Identity of School Students: A Phenomenological Study of Secondary Students

The media plays an effective role in institutionalizing values and forming or changing national identity as the largest level of identity and acts as a variable lever of national identity. The aim of the current research was to analyze the role of mass and social media in the construction of national identity according to the students' lived experience, which was done with a phenomenological approach. The research method was applied in terms of purpose and qualitative in terms of the nature of the data. The statistical population of the research included all students of the first and second secondary courses in Ardabil city. The sample size was 17 students who were selected by purposeful sampling based on the principle of theoretical saturation and then the data were analyzed based on thematic analysis. The findings showed that based on the lived experience of the participants, the gap between knowledge, attitude and behavior towards national identity was evident in mass and social media; So that the national identity and its dimensions among teenagers whose dominant media is social media is less than among teenagers whose dominant media is mass media. Teenagers with the dominant use of mass media have tried to protect the traditional sources of national identity, on the other hand, the teenagers with the dominant use of social media represented themselves in favor of global or cosmopolitan identity.