The antisocial side effects of social media.

Just Sitting Here

What do humans do when they do nothing? They think about their social life. This, however, is increasingly prevented by the attention economy.

The older ones among us certainly remember the German comedian Vicco von Bülow alias Loriot, whose favourite topic was the dysfunctional human communication. In this grandiose scene in the life of an elderly couple, for example, such communication failures come to a dramatic end. And all this only because the man simply wants to sit around seemingly inactively, the woman cannot understand this and tries to encourage him to be more active. (The scene is only available in German, but there is a great translation in this comment.)

In a time without internet and long before the ubiquitous distraction of smartphones and social media, this short scene was exaggerated but not absurd. Today it would be completely incomprehensible, because the role of the woman in this scene has long been taken over by…