Digital potential: children in front of the screens! 1 │ column

Are you following the debate on digital education in despair, indecisiveness, concern? According to these 6 arguments from scoyo columnist Christian Hanne, even the biggest pessimists will demand out loud: "Digital power for children!".

Digital education is a topic that nobody really can avoid at the moment. | © Cody Berg / Unsplash

As a parent, you have probably already thought about your children’s media behavior. (Whoever says no, throw the first smartphone!) Do more than eight hours a day have a bad influence on school performance? Is “Call of Duty” an appropriate game for a four year old? "Bibis Beauty Palace" has a deterrent effect and motivates you to learn?

The neuroscientist trumpets into the ears of such insecure parents Manfred Spitzer for years his theses on the harmful influence of evil digital media. With missionary enthusiasm and with the sarrazine-like selective use of statistics, Mr. Spitzer leads a veritable crusade against smartphones, tablets and WLAN with popular science books such as "Digital Dementia: How We Bring Us and Our Children Out of Mind". They are more harmful to him than asbestos and nicotine.

In a recent interview with Deutschlandfunk, he warned again of the questionable effects of digitalization:

"We are bringing up a generation of disabled people, I’ll say it drastically. (…) If you only wipe as a kindergarten child, your career as a cleaning specialist ends. You just shouldn’t do that. "

A statement that is as hostile to the disabled as it is socially discriminatory, which drives your pulse up and causes foaming at the mouth. Fortunately, there are many journalists, scientists and educators who deal with Spitzer’s views in terms of content and argument, so I don’t have to do that. I couldn’t do it either. For me, the undifferentiated vehemence with which Mr. Spitzer demonizes digitalization triggers the late adolescent reflex of arguing just the opposite. (A post-adolescent behavioral disorder that stems from playing Donkey Kong on the C64 as a child.)

“Our children need unlimited access to tablets and smartphones & Co., because this is the only way to become smart, fit and rich! "

1. Googling makes you smart!

Mr. Spitzer is a big opponent of googling, at least when children and adolescents do. Research on the Internet does not lead to anything superficial right Knowledge. Books should be preferred, however, because you can be reasonably sure that what is inside is correct. An argument based on feet of clay. After all, Mr. Spitzer’s crude, culture-pessimistic views do not become more conclusive just because they are available in book form. In a way, he himself provides the counter-evidence to his own statement.

Fortunately, we don’t have to be afraid to let our children google. In a field trial that can be considered representative for 42-year-old married social scientists who work as communication consultants and live in Berlin-Moabit with a wife and two children, I have unequivocally demonstrated that the Internet is very beneficial for the transfer of knowledge. Through intensive googling, for example, I found a lot of articles and articles that critically question Mr. Spitzer’s reasoning and methodology. This has given me insightful insights that would not have been so easy without Google. So Google can not endanger a high school diploma!

2. Digital media make you rich

If you want to believe Mr. Spitzer – and I hope you don’t want to – the use of social media leads to social decline and makes our children fools who have to deal with precarious employment. This is of course gross nonsense. Exactly the opposite is the case. Digital media are virtually a guarantee of social advancement and unimaginable wealth. Take a look at the top ten on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world. Five of them have earned their Dagobert-Duck billion dollar fortune with online trading, software products, social networks or telecommunications.

We should not keep our children away from the digital media, but rather introduce them to them from an early age. By educating our children to be digital natives, the chances of them becoming billionaires increase. Namely – according to Forbes Top 10 – to 50 percent. Do you find this probability calculation illogical? Then you just haven’t googled yourself smart enough.

Rich from early digital media consumption? Sure, of course! Everyone has the chance to become the next Mark Zuckerberg © Artem Beliaikin / pexels

3. Continuous gaming trains dexterity

Mr. Spitzer also complains time and again that the early use of smartphones and tablets is the cause of motor and sensory deficiencies in children, so that they cannot even “hold a pen” at school. I would like to point out that schools in the 21st century no longer use pencils to scratch slates. (Mr. Spitzer could have googled that.) So we don’t have to worry if our kids can’t handle a hand ax because they wiped too much on the touchscreen.

A future-oriented education ensures that children not only play a lot with the tablet, but also play several hours a day at the console in kindergarten. Regular use of the controller with its countless buttons, buttons and levers is an optimal training for your dexterity. After a short time, children can use the controller virtuously and conjure up the most fantastic moves on the screen in "FIFA 18". And faster than Mr. Spitzer can say "kindergarten finger games".

When do you have to hold a stylus today? Today, dexterity is trained through gaming. | © Chris Liverani / Unsplash

4. The future belongs to digital sports cannons!

With which I would like to refute another panicky thesis that not only Mr. Spitzer cites from time to time: digitization promotes lack of exercise and obesity. Through the digital media, we are pulling a generation of sports people, so to speak.

A fear that we as parents can understand very well. We are all concerned that our overweight children, who are constantly eating chips at the console, are unable to catch a ball, and that their only physical activity is to go to the toilet now and then. Do they face the unsightly fate of a sporty rivet that is always chosen last in physical education? A social humiliation that we naturally want to spare our children.

Nevertheless, we do not have to register our children actionistically in the gymnastics, swimming and athletics club. The future of sport is namely eSport! Tens of thousands of tickets are sold for eSports tournaments, successful eSportsmen earn six-figure annual salaries, football clubs such as Schalke 04, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain have their own eSports departments and there are serious efforts to make eSports become Olympic. So we have to take an example from the figure skating mothers of the GDR stroke and, as Playstation parents, drive our chubby children to the console. It will probably be your only way to gain athletic fame. And then we no longer have to be ashamed to admit to friends and relatives that our children are addicted to computers, but can proudly say: "My child is an elite athlete and trains four hours a day!"

Eat physical education and soccer training – the future belongs to eSports! | © Mali Maeder / pexels

5. Smartphones save family communication

For Mr. Spitzer (and not only for him) it is also worrying that children and adolescents do all their social contacts on the screen. The new media would prevent real relationships.
This argument is nonsense too. On the contrary: smartphones are necessary to maintain communication with our children. As parents, we all face the problem that from a certain age our children only speak to us in one-word sentences. ("How was it at school?" "Good" "Was there something special?" "No" "What was there for lunch?" "Don’t know."). Here, smartphones offer the last opportunity to talk to our children. All we have to do is give our children a smartphone and then tell them after a few weeks that they should limit their media consumption, otherwise WiFi access would be blocked. Admittedly, this does not result in nice conversations, but rather conversations characterized by mutual blame, which are conducted at a socially abnormal level. But that’s how we maintain very real relationships with our children. And that’s what Mr. Spitzer wants.

6. No digital power to the ass violin

Surely you are now sharing my unconditional support for digitization because of its indescribable beneficial effects. However, I don’t want to hide the fact that there are also dark sides. The internet is full of content and people we want to keep our children away from. Conspiracy theorists are talking about chemtrails, citizens are rushing against the state, AfDers are spreading lies about refugees, US presidents are writing fake tweets and brutal porn videos are just a click away.

But that’s exactly why we have to send our children online. After all, we don’t want to leave the digital world to criminals, racists, perverts, psychopaths and liars. Let us educate our children to be compassionate, reflective and open minded people, then they will make the internet a better place!

After completing the article, I cleverly googled and gained the knowledge that my unique concept of "digital potency" is not quite as unique, but was already used by Gunter Dueck on his "WILD DUECK BLOG" in 2012, in an "exaggerator against." the over-sharpener ".

More columns by Christian Hanne here in ELTERN! Magazine:

About the author

Christian Hanne, born in 1975, is in Westerwald grew up and read too much Ephraim Kishon as a child and watched “Naked Cannon”. He now lives in Berlin-Moabit with his wife and two children. On his blog "Familienbetrieb", on Twitter and Facebook, he writes about the normal everyday madness. In culinary terms, he has an obsessive passion for cheesecake. Even with raisins. Otherwise, he’s mentally reasonably stable.

In September his book “When it’s a boy, we call him Judith” was published by Seitenstraßenverlag. In twelve not-so-short stories, he ponders how pregnancy, marathon births and nocturnal babies put a modern, equal partnership to the test.