Media criticism: The smartphone is to blame for everything, exclamation!

column

For the tenth anniversary of the operating system Android, the smartphone is omnipresent, but also: bad. Bad, bad, bad, if you follow the current debate. The smartphone criticism in Germany has done a feat - it is even duller, more misguided and pathologizing than the Internet criticism. The smartphone is practically to blame for everything, in its almost toxic connection with the youth, exclamation point! "Smartphone" is used primarily as a cipher for criticism of life practice and behaviors of younger generations.

It's so easy to criticize the smartphone. Always goes. This pattern follows the German digital disease, namely the absurd fixation of hardware in engineering Germany, the naive blindness to the software-based variety of networking and virtuality. There's the device, you can see and touch it, so you do not have to keep looking.

Children are committed as victims

Smartphone criticism is by no means generally unwise or meaningless. But fixing them to the behavior of younger generations is already a misleading focus. "But what does that do to our children?" - This generates automatically questionable results as a question. The simple counter sample: "What is the diving sport doing with our children?" - Again, you will not be able to answer otherwise than with negative scenarios. For through the passive perspective of this standard question of cultural criticism, the children are identified as victims who are hurt by something. Either against their will or without their knowledge, so they are weak or stupid or both. Active perspectives are hidden or at most anekdotisch scattered.

If you start with such a question, of course, come addiction and mental problems of all kinds, depression, suicidal thoughts, lack of sleep and narcissism. "What does it matter with our children?" Is a framing that only goes to the negative.

Smartphone criticism must be capitalism and ultimately society criticism, everything else is window dressing at the expense of digitally addicted, young people who are structurally too stupid to understand what is happening to them. In two current pieces in the SPIEGEL and in the "ZEIT magazine" can be seen in my view, what goes wrong in the German smartphone criticism. The SPIEGEL wrote recently in a title story already in the introduction, the above question "What's up with them?", With the young people. And the "ZEIT magazine" closes its article with maximum generational self-righteousness, the young people will eventually come to their senses and "look back with a smile on the aberrations of their youth". Unfortunately only "at best" - the rest is stupid, even the best sage does not help, haha.

At that time we still had our traditional telephone numbers

However, this is a fitting end to an already disturbing start. For the "ZEIT magazine" seriously reproaches the youth that it would not revolt as violently as the apparently famos rebellious generations before: "Previously shook teens on the nerves of their parents and the foundations of the society Today, instead of punk rock penetrates only even digital flickering from the children's rooms. " And: "Instead of angry door pops and deafening noise penetrates from the nursery only ghostly silence." The compelling quintessence: Today's young people can not do anything right, not even annoying. What a cohort-wise, generation-yelling Ichichich perspective.

The SPIEGEL article reveals a technological perspective when it comes to a young woman who wants to reach her girlfriends: "She does not have her number in her head, why?" They are stored in her smartphone. " The subliminal skepticism in this sentence reveals how poisoned the smartphone critique is by completely outdated technology images in the minds of the not-so-very-young.

Knowing phone numbers by heart was not a feat, but a necessary crutch for a ridiculously inflexible technology called a phone. If you wanted to talk to a person in the 20th century, you had to call an apartment, really. And unfortunately, one only had the opportunity to enter an arbitrary, erratic, erratic, otherwise worthless code in a largely unprogrammable machine. At that time we still had our traditional telephone numbers, those were times!

If you reproach young people for not submitting to this ancient technique, you are accused of not being like yourself. Especially where it is outdated, it is now irrelevant habits. Yes, great-grandfather used to know the bridle signals used to steer horses, why do not you apply them to your electric car, Marie?

The boys are better prepared for what is coming

Even the complaint that the young people today would not experience anything directly, but only photographing with their smartphones, is one of the wanest complaints of the present. For the first, so even the last own experience scrap jazzed up to the epochal feature of being, you know Margot, as I then overturned the table after the second Piña Colada in the Dominican Republic, I was already a real guy, right. Secondly, they accuse the youth of staging in a world that has been staged market-driven for decades to the damned detail, because it has always rewarded staging. Thirdly, the sharing of experiences, actions, thoughts, feelings, self-descriptions - in interpersonal communication - has a value in itself, even if it seems strange to uninvolved viewers.

If any group of people can cope with the manifold complexities and impositions of today's world - then those who have grown up with the constant return channel. Who think in their network-driven action at any time an audience and its reactions. Which for this reason will be better equipped intellectually for the coming difficulties than the elders.

We leave the younger generations with a world brimming with nationalists and Nazis, populists and Islamist terrorists, not to mention climate change and environmental degradation - but the smartphone is to blame for the growing depression of the youth. The elders of today dedicated a full decade to the Golden I Dance in the 1980s, but the young people are narcissists because they use the devil's device to send selfies. They no longer speak spelling because WhatsApp is more important to them than the Duden.

Smartphones as a crystallization point of capitalism

Oh what spelling, the youth can not even look right! This charge seems overdrawn? No, the smartphone criticism also creates that. In SPIEGEL a psychology professor is benevolently quoted: "In the coming decade, we will see more young people who probably know the right emoji for a situation - but not the right facial expression." A grotesque and degrading sentence.

I would like to propose a perspective that seems to me much closer to the actual happenings: The smartphone is the crystallization point of today's capitalism and thus of today's society. In most cases, the behavior of younger generations is simply a reaction to the world we set before them. And mostly even a clever one.

Everything we believe we see in a smartphone is actually the product of our own decade-long work. For better or for worse. Of course, what the smartphone really turns into a much-criticized object can be recognized in the smartphone itself. You just have to switch it off and look very carefully into the black, reflective surface.