Get to work! New popular science books: “Without trust, life becomes torture”

“The popularity of social media is challenging traditional media – and therefore journalism,” writes Sasha Lobo, 48, in her recently published book. After the best-selling book “Reality Shock” (2019), the German digitalization expert and online columnist for Der Spiegel now writes about a large-scale crisis of trust in society. After a well-reasoned analysis, he finally makes recommendations on how we can collectively and individually contribute to overcoming this crisis.

“A series of national and international crises should be understood as the backdrop to a major crisis of confidence,” Lobo writes. And he lists the events of the 21st century, starting with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the financial crisis of 2008, the coronavirus crisis of 2020 and the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022. This was accompanied by rapid digitalization and the release of the iPhone in 2007, which completely revolutionized media.

A quarter of an hour of reading a daily subscription newspaper in the morning, a few minutes of radio news on the way to the office, Tagesschau on TV in the evening: this is how Lobo describes media consumption in 1993 and contrasts it “with the aggressive barrage of news that will rain down on you incessantly in 2023.” . Where it is almost impossible to use any social network without coming across a few private and a lot of political news in the so-called “news feed”.

“The old trust is built on institutions, hierarchies and habits, the social pillars of the 20th century, so to speak,” Lobo writes. The Old Trust is based on clarity, predictability and stability. “The new trust, on the other hand, is more fluid, social and more procedural,” Lobo continues. “It’s based on fast communication, network group collaboration and a sense of relevance.”

New trust, like old trust, takes time and effort, but it becomes disillusioned and can be destroyed. But it can withstand the challenges of the 21st century much better than trust built the old way. “Fortunately,” says Lobo, “because without basic trust in society and the political system, life becomes torture.” Ultimately, according to German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998), trust is “a mechanism for reducing social complexity.”