This article, "Ständig passiert nichts!" or in English "Nothing ever happens to me!" appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper in September of this year, authored by the internet-researcher Adrian Lobe. In the photograph accompanying the article, four children sit on a park-bench totally absorbed in the videos, games, images, and texts that appear on their cell-phones, as if "transported out of their physical environment, and concerned mostly with FOMO"—the Fear of Missing Out on something—and combatting "die Ereignisarmut des Alltags", the tedium of a life in which nothing ever happens.
Looking at the teenagers in the photograph, I remember my own school-years, when I came home from school, went directly to the TV room, and sat there in front of the boob-tube until my mother called us for supper. I could hardly wait to get the tedium and mental-stasis of school-work out of my system. Then, of course, after supper, I had to do homework, which I also hated. I should also add that school-work gave me the basis for an education, but the tedium and stasis weighed down my spirits, making me feel like a force-fed goose.
For grown-ups, on the other hand, a cell-phone can provide endlesss entertainment to cover the "in-between times", as Adrian Lobe describes it, of sitting in an airport departure-lounge and watching Adam Rose's hilarious videos, popular-song excerpts by the Brazilian Lord Vinheteiro, or Russell Stephen Edwards's visual histories of East London. Twenty minutes of in-between time will vanish in seconds!
But I sit in the same airport departure-lounge as all these other people looking at their cell-phones, and I get the creeps. So while I think that Adrian Lobe overdoes the sense of crisis—his description of the "brüchig gewordene Privatsphären"—the fragile state of private spaces—watching the fixed faces and immobile bodies staring into their mobile phones still gives me the creeps. It reminds me of movies about aliens taking over the minds of humans, such as Invaders from Mars from 1953, Invasion of the Body-Snatchers from 1956, or They Live! filmed in 1988.
Mostly "Ständig passiert nichts" offers a kind of psychoanalysis of frequent cell-phone use, starting with the effect of consuming so many unrelated sound-bites. Lobe complains that they provide only "diffused" entertainment, with no plot or continuing action, that make users function mechanically rather than creatively. Adrian Lobe says it reminds him of the "proverbial pigeon in a Skinner-box". He means B. F. Skinner, an American psychologist who did research into conditioned behavior, and made his mark on the spirit of American TV and radio-advertising.
As I read "Ständig passiert nichts", I realized something else, Lobe's use of the new vocabulary of advertising on the Internet. My reader may not know much about it, but in the coming years, they will surely hear the terms a lot. So, to introduce them, I offer them to my readers, first in German and then English:
- Zeitvertreib: literally the act of driving away time, but in daily use, covering a time-breach in your daily schedule by tuning in to your cell-phone apps;
- Leergelassenheit: literally blank lines on a page, but in daily use, spiritual dead-zones in one's daily life. The blank lines in our lives do a lot to keep cell-phones in business;
- Hingehaltenheit: literally to hold at a distance, but in daily use, to keep in limbo, or suspended in a void.
- Ausgeliefertheit: literally means extradition of criminals or suspects, but in daily use, it means to exile someone or render him helpless.
Th use of so many negative terms when talking about a device as useful as a cell-phone struck me as unduly pessimistic. To darken its reputation, when it helps so much to connect people and gives them access to so many opportunities really bespeaks the addictive qualities of the cell-phone. Like so many addictions, taking away a man's phone will leave him feeling abandoned, helpless, and cut off from humanity. Once you taste life in the fast-lane of a cell-phone, you never want it to end.