Swiping Ourselves to Death

An 8-year-old girl dies in a TikTok challenge: She overestimates herself while trying to strangle herself for as long as possible while recording with her smartphone. In London, 12-year-old Archie falls into a coma after presumably also taking part in an Internet test of courage. These are – unfortunately – no longer isolated cases.

Calls for better regulation of social media are quickly being made, but they are addressing the symptoms, not the causes. The problem is not that a lot of nonsense is spread through digital media – the problem is that our society to this day has been downright naive in its use of these media and euphorically celebrates the new possibilities. Critics are quickly seen as apocalyptic. Wrongly so, because their main concern is to make the possibilities and limits of digital media visible and to weigh them up.

Behind the deaths lie many other problems: steadily increasing cyberbullying, a worrying decline in learning and reading performance, the rise of loneliness, to name just a few. The causes lie, on the one hand, in the duration of use of digital media, which is steadily increasing and starts earlier and earlier in life, and in their distraction potential, which leads to targeted manipulation through skillful programming.

From an educational point of view, there is a need for action here – but not so much with regard to the question of how much digital media is now used in the classroom. We have known for a long time that bad teaching will not be improved by digital media; only good teaching can benefit from it. Instead, we need to pay much more attention to media education than we have in the past: it is the decisive factor in ensuring that young and old not only use technology, but that technology serves them. Digital media permanently change the way people feel, think and act and thus influence the values and norms that exist in a society – and thus also the way family, friendship and democracy are lived.

Of course, digital media also offer opportunities in the classroom: in diagnosis, feedback, and differentiation of practice phases. Digital media also open up new opportunities outside of school, such as more efficient communication, better participation and more transparent processes. But those who, out of convenience, only hold parents' evenings digitally, chat for hours with their girlfriend a few doors down instead of visiting her, and inform themselves about politics exclusively in social media and no longer read newspapers are falling into a digitization trap.

All these digital options generate a double problem. First, these options can only be used if people bring them to life. This requires media competence, which not only includes the use of digital media, but above all a pronounced critical faculties. It's about reflecting on how we use digital media: What does the medium I use do to me?

Secondly, every opportunity created by digital media always also leads to an option from the pre-digital era becoming unavailable sooner or later. Libraries, for example, are increasingly digitized and thus enable much faster searching. What is lost, however, is the freedom to browse around, to meet fellow students and to get to know people by chance. All of this may sound romantic – yet such processes are particularly effective for education.

So what needs to happen? Schools in particular need concepts for sound media education – but so do universities and other institutions. In the process, not everything that can be digitized should be digitized blindly. Instead, three basic principles must be observed:

• Media education must always critically and constructively question every use of media - Whether analog or digital, technology is never just good or bad: it is we humans who use technology for good or for bad. 

• Media education must keep the temporality of education in mind, i.e. it must not start too early or too late. This applies, for example, to the question of when to talk to children about cyberbullying, sexting and the like: Too early can have just as serious consequences as too late.

• Media education must also maintain a balance: Only if there is a balance and learners experience, for example, the possibilities of digital reading as well as those of analog reading, can they develop media competence.

However, the professionalism of the teachers is always crucial: If teachers write private WhatsApp messages during school hours, this is not only bad teaching, but a declaration of pedagogical bankruptcy.

Image by Artem Podrez