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If I didn't have any social media accounts and just read the feature section to find out what's going on on Twitter, Instagram and the other platforms, I would think it must be absolute hell. That would be a little right, but otherwise quite wrong. Of course, you have to talk about what's going wrong, I myself only recently wrote an essay on so-called "hate on the Internet", unfortunately I involuntarily became an expert on this. You are welcome to read. But not now.
It is, of course, the logic of the media that bad news is reported more often than good news. "45,000 Germans were infected with Corona yesterday" is a message, "72 million Germans had a delicious breakfast yesterday" is not. But we wanted to talk about the features section and naturally there is not only news in the sense of "yesterday, person X in place Y said this and that", but mainly considerations about the state of society and culture and social media come off really badly on average . Unfair if you ask me!
From a feature section point of view, social media are for the most part a disgusting rat hole full of cancel culture and pranger culture, a cold-hearted hate marketplace where you can't say anything more than a man, of course, and of course the lap from which the #metoo movement comes from crawled, which has been continuously destroying livelihoods ever since.
In addition, a perfidious like machine that forces women to have their lips sprayed on and to film themselves applying makeup.
In any case, nothing where you can experience intellectual challenge or just have fun.
But honestly, if social media were like what you can read in the features section, nobody would log in anymore.
Even outside of Twitter, many do not understand irony
A few days ago you could read on Zeit Online: »The logic of social media is based on a yes / no version of the world in which third positions hardly have a place.« The literary scholar Erika Thomalla wrote that there »little leeway there for neutral, deliberate, ambivalent or ambiguous statements ", a lot of affirmation and escalation, one is somehow always" progressive or conservative, left or right, for or against "and one always has to mark with a winking smiley or a hashtag, if one means something ironic so that one is not misunderstood.
However, that is not entirely true. It is true that there are people who mark ironic statements with a »#sarcasm« and there are people who are afraid of doing something that is misleading or wrong at some point and then being scourged by a shit storm. But: First of all, there are tons of ironic statements on Twitter that are not marked as such, as a heavy user I can assure you. Second, it is true that people sometimes take ironic statements seriously, but that happens every day outside of social media. (I once wrote a completely ironic column about what a feminist hero Justin Trudeau is, and there are still people today who think I find him horny and hot. Man, people!)
And, thirdly, it's sometimes even more fun to see all the things people can get wrong. A few days before New Year's Eve, one of my favorite Twitter accounts, DJ Lotti, wrote: »On a personal note: my husband was caught yesterday on the border with poland with 2 tons of thunder in his ford transit. Unfortunately, it is impossible for us to bear the legal fees ourselves. I have therefore set up a gofundme (initially 150,000 € as a donation target) «. Unfortunately there were a lot of people who took it seriously and got upset about unreasonable firecracker fans. If one were to deal with the account a bit, one would know that "DJ Lotti" is a 14-year-old difficult to educate young person who is currently going through the separation from her roughly twelfth husband, is preparing for her candidacy as mayor of Stralsund,but also wants to emigrate to Madeira soon, sometimes throws her student interns down the stairs and was recently beaten up by Elke Heidenreich. The thing about the firecrackers could of course still be true, we don't know.
Why is there so seldom a consideration in the features section about what is just incredibly funny or dear or smart and what comes from social media?
It's a bit funny that social media is so often accused of shortening and polemicizing everything and only knowing black and white - and that this is a polemical shortening and black and white thinking at the same time.
On Instagram there are not only women who take photos of their beige furnished lofts and sell lip gloss, but also live streams of readings, there are differentiated book reviews, there are pages full of photos of flying squirrels and oriental cats that look like a mixture of a big cat and Bat, you can learn the ukulele there or how to cut your own hair.
Nobody writes editorials about all the harmless things
There are not only Shitstorms on Twitter, there are also people who do really extensive educational work or just write about their worries and fears, take photos of their pets or post the books they are reading. Or talk about their illnesses or riding excursions. There is an account called »soviet soldiers dancing« which has videos of dancing soldiers underlaid with audio tracks by Mariah Carey, Lady Gaga or »Feliz Navidad«. It's completely funny. Or: Pimmelgate! There are photos of trees that look like they are twerking or the Australian ENT doctor who explains in a video how to correctly push the swab into your nose without it hurting. All completely harmless, but Jens Jessen will never write an angry leading article about it in “Die Zeit”.
The thing is: the columnists know all that. They read diligently, because without social media most of them would have no idea what we woken cancel warriors talk about all the time. They constantly plow through the free content we deliver, but only write about it when they sense a scandal or need an outlet for their feeling of being left behind. Johanna Adorján has written an entire novel ("Ciao") about an aging columnist who at the end of the story experienced a bloodcurdling shit storm on Twitter because it fully confirms all the clichés about social media that columnists have.
Here is an incomplete list of really good things that I have seen on social media: I met some of my best friends there, I learned about very good books, I learned a vegan pancake recipe and that you can also make the sandwich toaster with baking paper can use (you don't have to clean anything!).
I've laughed tears a lot because people write funny things.
I found all of my tattoo artists there.
I've heard from people that they named their baby after me (how awesome is that?).
I chatted with a young AfD voter who sent me photos of his well-trained bare upper body to convince me to sleep with a real German.
By the way: my cell phone is broken
Or that: When I was still mainly writing for »taz«, I had very little money and at some point my cell phone broke. I don't even remember what I wrote about it, but somehow a "taz" reader contacted me on Twitter who still had a used iPhone in the drawer: whether I want that. Of course I wanted, because I couldn't have bought a new one without borrowing money from somewhere. As a journalist, you shouldn't actually accept gifts. But we all make mistakes! (Right now my cell phone is broken again, by the way, and there is a reader who always gives me such fatherly tips on Instagram that I'm only just a few steps away from telling him that my iPhone always goes off and a new one will do me good would, but I'm pulling myself together.)
Or recently, just before Christmas, I had a little accident and bruised my knee really badly.
A week later it was still bad, but of course my doctor was on vacation and going to the emergency room seemed excessive to me, so I asked if there might be medically trained people following me who can tell me what to do and bang - I wrote messages with a trauma surgeon who gave me tips.
How beautiful and dear is that?
The knee is also better now.
I hate Twitter and Instagram sometimes too.
But imagine if it was a pandemic and we didn't have any of that.
That would really be hell.