smartphone culture

The term “collective stupidity in terms of convenience”, which I introduced a few columns earlier, also fits perfectly with the effects that the current smartphone culture is having on us. Apart from all the people who can no longer walk down the sidewalk attentively and with a straight look, run over other people while reading their SMS, fall into drain holes or run onto busy streets and get run over by trucks there. (Think of all those traumatized truck drivers for a change.) Aside from that, the effects can be felt organically right now.

For example, a friend of mine who is an artist got used to using his smartphone to go to the toilet. Especially for the so-called “sitting business” to drive away the boredom there. As a result, however, his lower body muscles have adjusted to only opening their doors when a message is shown on the front display. If he doesn’t have a smartphone in his hands at the front, it stays locked behind him. When his device broke one day, he drew a smartphone on a piece of paper with a felt-tip pen and held it in front of his eyes in the toilet. He reports that it worked quite well.

He says he would actually be quite happy with this new biomechanism if the whole thing didn’t also lead to devastating problems: A while ago he was having dinner with a gallery owner – a somewhat cold, elderly person – in a fine restaurant. He had decked himself out in a light-colored linen suit and hoped to establish a business relationship with the influential lady.

They chatted animatedly, talked about literature. The lady went far and monologued rapturously about art in general and the Documenta in particular, while my friend had to go to the toilet and suppressed this impulse somewhat tormentedly. Suddenly, the lady surprisingly twitched her cell phone to show him – my friend – a received Whatsapp message. Within a second, before he realized what was happening to him, his body had responded to the green light and opened all the floodgates. Using sheer willpower, he tried to make an emergency stop, but in vain. His lower body muscles had completely let go, extracted, and within a few seconds his pants under the table were noticeably filled while his head turned a deep red above the table.

The lady was irritated. She didn’t understand the connection between her completely harmless text message, the bright red face of her counterpart and the extremely unpleasant odor trail that suddenly appeared around her.

We should therefore not make ourselves too physically dependent on our communication tools. By the way, the gallery owner decided on another artist. Or rather, for an artist.

PS Please remember our big auction “PUDEL ART ACTION” at the Schauspielhaus Hamburg on October 20th, 2022 at 8 p.m. The most beautiful private items from artists and media workers such as DJ Koze, Peaches, Chilly Gonzales, Axel Prahl, Linda Zervakis, Caren Miosga, Die Toten Hosen, Bela B. Felsenheimer, Daniel Richter and many others will be auctioned there. The profit goes directly to the victims of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. If you are not in Hamburg that day, you can bid online via: https://www.lot-tissimo.com/de-de

We need you. And your money. At least a little bit of it.