KonzeptioNerd

Nackt unter Journalisten

I fianally yielded to social pressure (”*Have* you read Spiegel on social networks?!”) and actually bought 10/2009 of German weekly Der Spiegel to read what they feel needs to be said about life in online communities. And I shouldn’t have.Spiegel ist a consumer magazine, so I wasn’t surprised to find a string of more or less scandalous cases that I knew already, peppered with a few oversimplifications. But it’s been the same stuff experts as well as consumers must have read over and over again through the past, well, years. Stories of teenagers putting documentaries of their drunken excesses on plattforms where future and bemused employers can easily find them.

And yes, some people are naive and do stupid things. But by and large, the kids who grow up with the internet appear to be quite capable of controlling the medium and their appearence in it. Listen, if you can, to young girls taking about how they manage communication with strangers in public chats and networks. I think this fear of losing control to this “new” medium is mainly characteristic of those people for whom the internet was, indeed, at some point in their lives, a *new* medium.

But what is it with the (German) traditional media? On the one hand, they’re pushing online, they’ve long become part of large online marketing networks, but on the other hand, they keep positioning the internet as an uncanny space, fraught with uncertainties and uncalculable threats. What’s the story?

(The article is “Nackt unter Freunden”, Spiegel 10/2009, pp. 118-131.)

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