Impact of internet contact on the ideological and mental health education of university students

Media contact refers to the behavioral response of an audience to contact with specific media based on particular needs. The contact can be described in terms of frequency, during, form, content, and method (Tassi, 2018). The Internet has been termed the “fourth media” after newspapers, radio, and television, and rapidly penetrated all fields of modern life with its colorful, intuitive, vivid, emotive, lively, and exciting characteristics (Van Dijck, 2022).

As of June 30, 2022, there are 5.47 billion Internet users in the world’s 7.93 billion population, and the Internet penetration rate was 68.98% (Internet Usage Statistics, 2022). In 2021, there was 191 million Internet users among children and adolescents in China, and the Internet penetration rate was 96.8% (China Youth Network, 2022). Internet contact is a new concept in the Internet era. Internet contact wasn’t clearly defined, typically focusing on the qualitative analysis of form, content, duration, and frequency. Internet contact included three dimensions in this study: Internet contact during (ICD), online entertainment duration, and fragmented learning duration. Reading online news, watching videos, posting, emailing, chatting, finding information and shopping online are all important parts of university student’s lives, and they affect every aspect of their daily lives to meet their social, entertainment, informational and psychological needs (Li et al., 2022a).

There is no clear definition for ideological and mental health education (IMHE) in the Internet era yet. In this study, IMHE refers to the deep integration of information technologies, such as new media, 5G, and big data with traditional IMHE, as well as the integration of explicit and implicit, online and offline IMHE based on content, platforms, ideas, and methods in order to improve communication effect. The communication environment of IMHE has become more complex in the Internet era, involving the integration of culture, technology, society, and the psychological environment (Yao, 2023). Market-oriented reform has meant online media are increasingly driven by commercial interests. The commercial perspective caters to the needs of the public with an entertaining attitude (Szu et al., 2017), resulting in the continuous production of many similar, often vulgar, fast-food entertainment and cultural products. Even Internet news and information dissemination have shown a clear trend of pan entertainment (Li and Wan, 2023). The cultural spirit of entertainment is contradictory to the seriousness of IMHE, which may lead to marginalization, vulgarization, and stigmatization of IMHE (Chen and Jing, 2018). This can significantly affect the value orientation, psychology, personality and interpersonal interaction of university students (Dong et al., 2017).

In concrete terms, Internet contact affects university students’ IMHE communication effect in two opposite ways–with promotion and inhibition of communication effects (Huang et al., 2021). The openness of the Internet provides new opportunities for information access, enriches the carrier and content, enhances the penetration of IMHE of university students, strengthens their subjective consciousness, and speeds up the cognitive transmission and value-added speed (Zhang et al., 2023). Especially the integration of new media and artificial intelligence greatly expands the form and content of IMHE (Yuan, 2022). On the contrary, researchers describing the inhibitory effect believed that the increasing entertainment and decadent value orientation of new media culture, and the emergence of a large amount of inauthentic information on the Internet, including false, pornographic, violent, and reactionary spam, are prone to misleading and inducing cognitive bias and fast-food learning habits among university and college students, and jeopardizing their physical and mental health (Cebrian-Robles, 2019; Xu et al., 2022). Furthermore, the Internet’s accessibility weakens the effect of traditional ideological education for university students, challenging the authority of traditional sources of education, and affecting the value judgment ability of students.

Whether the communication of university students’ IMHE is effective, is mainly reflected in whether students’ cognition is improved, their spiritual needs are met, and their personal development is promoted. Cognition is a psychological activity that reflects the characteristics and internal connections of objective things from the surface to the inside, from phenomena to essence, and is also the processing of information by the human brain (Yang, 2022). Up to now, the communication effect of IMHE is not convenient for quantitative analysis, which seriously affects the systematic study in this field.

Thus, the following hypothesis is proposed:

Hypothesis H1: There are significant differences in the communication effect of ICD on IMHE among Chinese university students, which will provide theoretical references for future intervention.

Hypothesis H1a: There is a significant difference in the cognitive communication effect of ICD on IMHE among Chinese university students.

Hypothesis H1b: There is a significant difference in the emotional communication effect of ICD on IMHE among Chinese university students.

Hypothesis H1c: There is a significant difference in the will communication effect of ICD on IMHE among Chinese university students.

Hypothesis H1d: There is a significant difference in the behavioral communication effect of ICD on IMHE among Chinese university students.

These findings fill the existing literature gap in Internet contact and communication effect of IMHE among university students, as well as provide theoretical references for quantitatively analyzing and intervention in this field in the Internet era.