What the Sarah-Lee Heinrich case tells about growing up in digital media

Sarah-Lee Heinrich stated that she could not remember this tweet. The new federal spokeswoman for the Green Youth is said to have typed the word “Heil” under a swastika on her Twitter account in 2015, presumably meant sarcastically. Heinrich was born in 2001, she was a teenager in 2015 and, as she says, she was active in an “anti-fascist youth organization”. The word was “stupid and inappropriate,” she now explains. Either way, the digital trail was on the web until it was deleted.

As a millennium child, Heinrich was born in the middle of the digital age and, like all children of her generation, grew up between screens and displays, clicks, posts, chats, tweets and likes. As a matter of course, young people “share” with a public that is barely controllable, what moves them, irritates, excites them at the moment, what they show off with or how they want to be seen at the moment.

While a flippant slogan, political nonsense, a fleeting relationship used to drift away over the course of time or remained lying on yellowing stationery in the drawer, today all of this shimmers openly through a jointly populated digital image, visible to thousands.

“I was young and needed the attention”

It is literally often, half contrite, half ironic: “I was young and needed the money” when someone confessed to former, irregular activities. Soon a new formula could be: “I was young and needed attention.” Caution, consideration, insight often come too late. Admittedly, the department of uncovered youthful sins existed before the digital one. Archives made of paper and celluloid were searched in order to prove Joschka Fischer throwing stones in riots, or actors that their careers began with the “Schoolgirl Report”. But never before has such masses of material from people been available to such great masses of other people.

The leap into the digital world was as epoch-making as the invention of making fire

Today’s older adults are among the last generations in the overall history of cultural techniques that have grown up predigitally. The leap into the digital world is possibly as epochal as the invention of making fire. But at the same time, societies have still not understood enough of the gigantic cosmos of communication in which the digital world merges into a shimmering continent.

When the first generation grew up digitally, there were hardly any adults there to guide them. This is one of the reasons why a dystopia of the anti-social network emerges as a counterpoint to the utopia of social networks. Not only because many people see the digital space as free of law, but simply because the private unwillingly diffuses into the public, because with the often unreachable digital traces, public remembering and forgetting can no longer be influenced by individuals. You can only delete something in your own account, and this often only happens when there has already been an uproar – and copies are already circulating.

The inevitability of experiences of the human soul

“The past is not dead, it is not even past,” wrote William Faulkner in the middle of the 20th century. He meant the inevitability of experiences of the human soul and in his own way named Sigmund Freud’s knowledge of the unconscious as a great store of experiences and impressions. Freud’s research trips to this memory took place in a discreet space, part of which is the absolute silence of the therapist.

In addition to everything else, the digital mega-memory produces an unmistakable, intimate inflation of data from fragments of past affects, attitudes and impulses that, unlike in the therapy room, rarely make sense. How the balance between intimate and public, spontaneous and reflective can be sought and found here will be one of the central learning tasks of the coming years, perhaps also that of a future digital ministry.

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