New media, also known as digital new media, "is a new media form developed after traditional media such as newspapers, radio and television." It is a form of communication and media that uses digital technology, network technology and mobile technology to provide users with information and entertainment services through channels such as the Internet, wireless communication networks and satellites, as well as terminals such as digital TVs, computers and mobile phones. " The new media is a "double-edged sword", which brings unprecedented convenience and speed to the ideological and political self-education of college students. At the same time, it has deepened college students' obedience and dependence on new media and its derivatives, bound their rational thinking, and made their ideological and political self-education face a dilemma.

Self-education execution is weak. Executive ability is the action ability of college students to effectively realize their own ideological and political education goals. The effectiveness of ideological and political self-education in colleges and universities is closely related to its execution. College students in their prime are full of energy, quick thinking and easy to accept new things. Faced with the rapid development of internet plus, cloud computing, 4G and other information technologies, they can actively integrate into the new media environment and have the desire to receive ideological and political education. However, due to the lack of external supervision, relatively independent life and insufficient self-discipline, a few college students are still accustomed to passive external education, easily addicted to the virtual new media world, easily induced by irrelevant or bad information, and unable to effectively carry out ideological and political self-education. College students not only benefit from the brand-new ideological and political education platform provided by new media, but also are easily troubled by excessive entertainment, which greatly reduces the execution of ideological and political self-education.

There is a phenomenon that self-education pays more attention to achievements than accomplishment. College students are enthusiastic audiences of new media. They quickly accepted and used new media such as WeChat, Weibo and QQ. They can master and use all kinds of new media skillfully, find the platform and resources needed for ideological and political self-education, and build a rich resource library for ideological and political self-education. However, from the perspective of educational motivation, when college students use new media to carry out ideological and political self-education, they also show a tendency of emphasizing knowledge over practice and achievements over literacy. In the process of education, idealized, knowledgeable and superficial educational thinking has broken the law of cognition-identification-internalization in ideological and political education, which has transformed the original ideological and political education into an abstract, formal knowledge block and its argumentation system, and made ideological and political education have a utilitarian examination-oriented tendency. Affected by this, in the new media environment, college students have also formed a test-oriented mentality in the process of ideological and political self-education, mostly using new media to search for knowledge points temporarily for exams and postgraduate entrance examinations, thus ignoring the improvement of their ideological and political literacy. This examination-oriented thinking and practical psychology not only deviate from the original intention of ideological and political education, but also make it difficult for college students to truly internalize and externalize Marxist world outlook, outlook on life and values.

Self-education is easily influenced by complex environment. With the rapid development of new media technology, information emerges one after another, and the trend of fragmentation, entertainment and cross-border is obvious, which makes the exchange and confrontation of various online ideological and political trends increasingly frequent and sharp. Social thoughts such as "universal values", "constitutional democracy", "neo-liberalism" and "historical nihilism" keep pouring into university campuses, and the ideological and political self-education of college students gradually tends to be open, pluralistic, cross and blended. This invisibly increases the difficulty of college students' ideological and political self-education, and puts forward higher requirements for their ability to collect, organize, express, analyze and distinguish ideological and political education information. If college students' ability to screen and distinguish information is not strong, and if educators and society can't give a strong theoretical response to erroneous ideological trends, then college students will easily lose their way and shake the mainstream ideology in the face of dazzling social ideological trends. Therefore, in the process of ideological and political self-education, they have encountered unprecedented cognitive challenges and conflicts in their world outlook, outlook on life and values.