A bit on Deutschlandfunk about the sizable group of people in Germany who do not use the internet.
They start talking about how offline people are usually disadvantaged in some way, but that can’t be the reason because you can get online with a prepaid plan and a second hand Android phone for a couple of bucks these days. Hearing the people coming to the digital support hotline talk, many of them do not see the point of or any need to be online. And that is a different problem altogether.
One of the reasons mentioned “a lot of negative coverage of the internet in the media” tallies with my own assessment. German journalists, politicians and lawyers have done their best to scare the living daylights out of people here1 and dissuade them from the internet and new developments in general. The damage done is significant but this broken mess is the society people here want to live in.
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/leben-ohne-internet-offliner-nonliner-100.html
My crank explanation for why they did that is because Axel Springer went to California and saw that they were infinitely behind when it comes to online and needed time to catch up. Cue lots of BILD headlines about the “dangers of the digital” and you can delay developments in a country that’s already behind. ↩︎
