My best friend: My mobile phone

Bing! sprachrohr_uniwue has posted a new picture for the first time in ages. – 16:42

Bing! "Hey! Could you maybe send me your notes from the last lecture?" – 16:43

Thousands of tasks and obligations rain down on us every day in the form of WhatsApp messages or Instagram notifications. We are constantly being called upon to do this quickly or take a quick look at that.

Through shrill Bing! sounds, they convey to us that whatever is happening on our phones right now is of the utmost urgency and requires our immediate attention. Because it is impossible to survive another second without the new Sprachrohr photo on Instagram.

Without us noticing, we let ourselves be flooded by a wave of messages on our best friend, which makes us silently and secretly dependent on it. And we even like it. We scroll mindlessly through Instagram and TikTok, liking food and weird dances. Playing games and taking selfies.

When we do misplace our phone, we immediately send out a whole search party. We've grown to love it. Like a friend.

Because that's how it started: As a friend and helper. As a small but fine device that made our lives considerably easier. The fast-forward button in a society where everything works according to the motto "prettier, faster and better".

The human brain is not an ice cream machine that freezes and stirs the mixture at the same time. Rather, it works like a modern tumble dryer. First the information "wash" is passed on and then the information "dry". It takes a bit longer to get clean and dried laundry.

Seen in this light, the mobile phone comes off quite well on paper: it does do quite fascinating work.

After all, the mobile phone has created a completely new form of communication through short messages via WhatsApp and social media, which sometimes even mimics face-to-face conversation by having emojis replace facial expressions and gestures. You can reach your friends anytime and anywhere. If you're running late, you quickly message the other person. And especially during the time of a global pandemic, when we couldn't see many people regularly, we should be quite happy about that. For example, how much more exhausting would studying have been completely without the social component. Through Zoom calls, at least we could still imitate it.

But with this new form of communication, an old one was also replaced. Think about it: when was the last time you asked someone for directions? Or spoke to someone on the bus? Rather quickly entered the destination on Google Maps. Quite romantically swiped on Tinder for 10 minutes. The mobile phone has simply made us all into little everyday social phobics. Whether that's good or bad, everyone has to decide for themselves.

But the mobile phone has revolutionised not just communication. Access to knowledge has also become so much more practical for us through mobile phones with internet available everywhere. Let's rewind fifty years:

In a time when nobody had a mobile phone with internet access, a question came up in a group of friends: When was Italy founded?

Unless you happened to have the right encyclopaedia on the history of Italy at home, someone would have to go to the trouble of going to the library to find the answer – or you simply didn't know.

Today the whole thing works a bit differently:

Through Google, with a functioning internet connection, we now get the answer within seconds: 1861. And we even learn in school to question the credibility of this answer, especially if it comes from Wikipedia.

Just as quickly as the answer to every conceivable question, news spreads on Instagram, Twitter and Co. like a tsunami. Of course, we always have to know everything that washes up to us: How would we survive without the information that Keeping Up With The Kardashians is ending after far too short 18 seasons?

Of course, these messages always come at the most convenient moments. After all, we have to go about our lives normally between the ringing. In the middle of a sentence BING! it happens every now and then, we let BING! ourselves get distracted and that's why the sentence is grammatically incorrect. Barely five minutes of studying, the phone rings and after you've dutifully replied to mum, you just quickly scroll through Instagram. An hour later you're watching the twentieth funny video, you've ordered the plastic-free cleaning tabs and accidentally forgotten to study. And at the end of the day, we wonder where the day went.

Some mobile phone brands are now deliberately showing us how much time we spend in front of the screen – whether time spent meaningfully or meaninglessly, we'll leave that open. But what can we do when we realise that we're throwing away more time than we'd like out the window? How can we best slow down society and simply press the pause button? The most effective answer is probably: switch it off. At the same time, however, this is also the answer that is hardest for most people. Because we've already developed too much of an affection for annoying ringtones, silly questions and time-consuming games.

So think smaller for now. Out of sight, out of mind: just put your phone in another room when you're studying. Or switching off notification sounds can also help you focus on one thing. It won't kill you to like the latest cat pictures after the next page of your seminar paper.

Rules within your friend group also help effectively: don't check your phone while you're together. Or don't take it with you at all if you don't absolutely need it, so we don't then post the picture of the beautiful sunset with the caption "What you see when you're not looking at your phone!" on Instagram. Because we've integrated mobile phones and social media so much into our everyday lives that sometimes we don't even notice what an irony we're expressing.

But as simple as that sounds now, it's not that easy. It happens far too quickly that you do a week of social media detox and the next morning you catch yourself having been on Instagram for ten minutes because you simply forgot.

Because it remains my best enemy.

You and 58 others liked the photo from @sprachrohr_uniwue – 16:44

"Of course, but I'm missing the last three slides, I was a bit distracted there :D" – 16:44