Generation Media

Spending half of her day in a café, she takes little sips of her latte and pretends to be insanely busy staring at the screen of her Mac book. What she is really doing is checking her e-mails every five minutes and looking for new friends on facebook. She is the embodiment of the generation media, at least according to Florian Schröder. 

When he was only 14 years old, Florian Schröder stood on stage for the first time giving examples of the jokes he usually entertained his class mates with. After high school, he toured through Germany with three fellow comedians putting up improvised cabaret shows until he began to work for the public radio station SWR in Freiburg. On the road to success Schröder came up with his first solo program which was called: you want it, too! In 2008, the artist started his first TV-show in public of television acting out live cabaret. He became famous for his way of presenting political satire, in particular for his gestures while imitating well known politicians, e.g. the chancellor Angela Merkel.

Florian Schroeder, Foto: www.siwikultur.de

In his show Generation Media, the artist criticizes not only young people`s mania with today´s media, but also the overall disorientation of the Bachelor graduates who prefer to study a media related subject instead of looking out for their own interests. Earsplitting, Schröder screams the word Bachelor over and over again into the crowd, comparing Germany´s education system to McDonalds and the food being served there: “it`s fatty, but you never get full”. 

Upon receiving their bachelor degrees, there are only two options for the future. Either they decide to earn more money as a lower qualified but convinced management consultant, or they call themselves “creatives” who stumble from one “project” to another barely making enough money to live on. In Schröder`s opinion, these so called “creatives” ply their dreadful trades in big cities like Berlin, Munich or Hamburg while calmly searching their troubled minds for ideas for their next screenplays. Subsequent to more of these elaborations, he draws a line to the beginning of the show. Where are those creative brains going to work on their next project? Of course in a café, with a latte, the Mac and the following twitter message: nothing has changed.

Florian Schröder tells stories about young people who don`t know what to do with their lives, who are not sure about themselves or their professional prospectives. Only one thing seems to be certain: it must have something to do with media. He explores what kinds of difficulties a world full of permanent information might contain in the process of growing up. “This generation is looking for security and backing up into privacy is their answer to it”, explains the cabaret artist after his show. In his opinion the problem is extending itself in the mixture of the necessity to be online all the time and the escape of the real and maybe precarious life situation.

Running up and down the stage Schröder tries to demonstrate how youngsters are taking pictures of themselves with their high tech mobile phone camera. Energetic he blurts out: “We are only rotating around ourselves!” The habit of self focusing is merely a sign for a helpless generation which is devastated to find a sense and place in life. You cannot avoid getting in touch with the media. Its influence on our daily lives is obvious.

Even though Schröder has a good point in criticizing the generation media, you cannot forget how important independent and accessible media institutions are for a functioning democracy. In addition, there are enough graduates who find a job upon receiving their degrees. Just imagine all of them sitting in cafés writing screenplays! Besides, many young people know how to use media sources properly and consider it starting point of opinion making and a platform of exchange.

With his successful show Generation Media, Florian Schröder makes the audience laugh and applaud. Ironically, he obviously forgets that he could be perceived as one of those very”creatives” he is making fun of. Dealing critically with certain aspects of society in the form of a cabaret show is the way Schröder chose to make a living of. Instead of drawing back into the private and safe sphere of home and using the media as the gateway to the world, he opts to put himself out there on stage in order to reach out for people and feed them information. Charismatically, with irony and a well developed line of thought, he proves to be successful in this business. If he has truly discovered a way of counteracting or merely reflects an inexorable development of society, is a question that remains in the open. After all, he is using the same media he exhibited in his show, by creating a profile on facebook and posting similar jokes on his wall.