As a writer, I have always been alienated from the so-called social media. Mainly because on Facebook, for example, I quickly realized that the constant presentation of personal experiences and opinions did not really interest me as authentic communication. For two reasons: What you tell a lot of people at the same time, whether via video, audio, image, or text, is automatically no longer really meant personally. But what is it then? Either it’s advertising for itself – look how cool, smart, sensitive, gifted or whatever I am – and thus a deeply narcissistic impulse. Humanly understandable, of course, and if you want to distract yourself, also often entertaining to follow – but quite tiresome in the long run. And I say this as someone who can hardly get enough of private cat videos… Whereby the realm of the documentary is still a category of its own and different, but I will come to that later.
Or you really want to express – “share” – something with your posts that transcends your own ego, something that is more than personally worth reporting. But then you automatically enter the realm of the arts or classical journalism. And there a rougher wind blows than in the private, well-liked circle of friends. So if you take a selfie of yourself on a mountaintop and post this, you will compete in principle – even if you do not know it – with a self-portrait by Van Gogh. Or if it’s a video, with, for example, Stanley Kubrick. Without having put the same energy and passion into these ventures. Painting a picture or making a film is something completely different than pressing a button on your smartphone. This is expressed in the fact that the normal selfie or video usually does not touch anyone, even if it has been recorded on Mount Everest, because it has no real artistic aura, of any kind. It is not an art, but ultimately only a narcissistic eruption. In the example mentioned, using the Himalayas as a backdrop for one’s own greatness. What most people, even if they find and like it great for the moment, will have completely forgotten in the next few minutes.
For me, therefore, until recently, social media were just a kind of modern digital gossip. Fascinating in that the most personal things could make the global round almost at the speed of light. For example, many years ago when I told my Finnish uncle, with whom I had only sporadic contact, that my divorce was fresh and official a few days earlier, he just said, he already knew. When, surprised, I asked him where, because to my knowledge he had no direct contact with my ex-wife, he just laughed and said, “Facebook.”
Personal things can actually reach the public in real time and completely uncontrollably in the Internet age. But what really touched me strangely and cemented my intuitive aversion to social media at the time was the aforementioned short, knowing laughter of my uncle before he said “Facebook.” For he did not ask why; the superficial information of my divorce as such, and that he had it available, seemed to satisfy him completely. In my opinion, what this reflected is the nature of online communication, which is aimed at rapid stimuli and has no particular interest in really sinking deeper into things. The next digital snack is waiting.
There not only seems to be junk food, quickly digestible and cheap, but also junk information, easy to process mentally, but without any mental nutritional value. This context-free, quickly absorbable information seems like the physical level of ultra-processed industrial food (i.e., frozen pizza, gummy bears, potato chip, etc.), covering the consciousness of contemporaries with a kind of unhealthy layer of fat from kilos, of information waste from gigabytes, which generates mental inertia instead of creating an alert focus.
This is perhaps a bit harsh as a general judgment, especially considering the new possibilities of getting to know people and the world of life that the online communication of social media offers. If you fly from Germany to Japan today, for example, and want to know the best jogging route into Tokyo and if someone else might want to run there, thanks to Facebook and other social platforms, such communicative networking is practically everyday life and quite welcome nowadays.
But what is easily overlooked is the parallel fact that the virtual world is just that: a shadow world. A kissing emoji is not the same as a real kiss, a follower is by no means a true friend in real life, and a clicked-on heart under a post is a very cheap, very non-binding sign of authentic appreciation.
Since for me quality is more important than quantity in virtually all areas of life, this meant, applied to social media, that I would prefer a single authentic contact to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of virtual friends anytime, anywhere. With which I exit the virtual game, so to speak, because on social media the true and, in case of emergency, only currency is the mass of likes, followers, comments, and so on . Which is actually completely natural, because in the marketplace, the laws of the market apply, which was already the case in pre-digital times.
But those who are more creative than commercially oriented should therefore not worry too much. On the contrary, this tension in relation to the mainstream, if it does not slip away in madness and egocentricity, can even be necessarily evolutionary, so that the development of human consciousness repeatedly receives fresh impulses and does not remain smugly stuck in one spot.
Whatever the situation, I never really warmed up to Facebook & Co. Which was obviously mutual, my humble rare posts did not receive much attention, so everything in order. If I wanted to inform myself, I either read the online versions of daily newspapers or checked the emerging, not yet established, alternative news portals. Television I had more or less given up a dozen years ago, about the time when there was hardly a “crime scene” thriller without either sexually specifically oriented commissioners or “right-wing” villains or threatening climate catastrophes engaged in their inescapable mischief. This was so obviously ideological propaganda in the guise of entertainment that I no longer felt like watching.
However, the problem, at the latest when the specter of Corona put people worldwide into panic, orchestrated with much noise by the established media, was that it became difficult to get even halfway neutral, i.e., more or less raw information, to be able to get a picture that had not been essentially pre-painted. Because even the alternative media, which were in conflict with the woke Zeitgeist, of course, automatically and inevitably tipped over in the other direction.
When ideology dominates society, it becomes insanely difficult to keep cool and escape this vicious cycle of hysterical opinions. It’s like road traffic: if someone tailgates you on the highway, you have to be very cool to avoid reacting aggressively or panicky yourself.
In the constant fire of ideologically over-the-top media, which continuously obscure and tremendously narrow our intellectual horizon with alleged climate catastrophes, freely selectable genders, and threatening fascism, the balancing counterweight of the so-called alternative portals can hardly be overestimated. Without Nius, Tichy’s Einblick, Reitschuster, and so on, Germany would be more or less ideologically completely standardized. Despite all the official talk of “our democracy.”
But of course, as an alert contemporary, one also wants a source of information that bubbles relatively independently of and unfiltered by political directions. Because that was actually the original promise of the Internet: freely accessible information for everyone, without alternativeless attitudes and predigested “narratives”. Free information, free opinion, free commenting, free posting – so that the real world can get a real picture of the real world. Including all the madness, the violence, the stupidity, but also the wisdom, beauty, and truth. The lotus flower of knowledge, as it is called in the Buddhist parable, grows to full bloom only in dirty mud.
And with this Zen-like swerve, I’m now at the platform “X”, the hidden destination port of this blog, to which I am headed in an admittedly ideologically very wide arc. Since Elon Musk bought the former Twitter a few years ago and renamed it “X”, there is suddenly a virtual global meeting place again, where continuously raw and not ideologically predigested information of all kinds is exchanged.
Whether it’s documents from the Epstein files, videos of alleged aliens or reptile people, or political demonstrations, clips of cats fighting cobras, images of murderers and their victims, speeches by Trump or Putin’s warnings about Western Satanism, the nutrition of Christiano Ronaldo, viral clips about a Scottish girl who defends her younger sister against sexual assault with an axe – “X” provides an uninterrupted stream. Except for pornographic or too inhumanly cruel content, there is no censorship, so you get a kind of unfiltered snapshot of the world served at any time. With which you can do what you want, a framing “from above” does not take place.
Instead, in principle, “X” regulates itself through its users, because of course comments and posts about everything and everyone potentially present the widest variety of points of view, and so everyone has the opportunity to make up their own mind. And it is precisely this possibility of enabling one, through information, to form one’s own judgment, which should actually be a democratic matter of course, that has been completely and inexcusably neglected by the traditional media over the past decades.
In contrast to other social media, which often filter and frame to the hilt, or those that are aimed at a clearly defined target group (dating apps, for example, or yoga forums and so on), “X” is comparable to a classic news agency that continuously forwards information of all kinds WITHOUT evaluation. Only that today no fax machine is rattling at some news desk and nowhere is a foreign correspondent typing his fingers ragged; you just have to be online to send and receive.
With the platform “X”, Elon Musk has in any case done the world an invaluable service in the sense of freedom and democracy. At least for the moment, he has broken the ideological chains that have been laid for information and thus for the human consciousness. Money and spirit, wealth and freedom in rare harmony. Which might also be an inspiration and wake-up call for the classic media to convey sober journalistic information again and not to wallow in the attitude and deficient education of the populace. Then maybe I would reach for daily newspapers again, online or even on paper, and maybe activate the television again. Until then, I’m trying to avoid junk information ideologically processed in thousands of ways, as much as I avoid junk food. It may not always work, but the attempt counts.
