My Class Reunion Was Meeting You Again Through Social Media
Remember Me From Yesterday?
IS the high school reunion past its prime number?
There are people for whom seeing old classmates in person volition never lose its entreatment: sipping watered-down cocktails with the first girl they e'er kissed or the first guy they smoked a cigarette with carries a nostalgic charge that status updates and digital photo albums tin't replace.
Merely for those who always pictured their reunion as an episode of "Where Are They Now?" — a chance to run across who's done well, who's gone downhill and who would like to apologize — the entire institution feels a fleck deflated now that, thanks to Facebook and similar sites, nobody really has to lose bear on anymore.
"Social networking has robbed us of our nostalgia," said Michael Fox, who attended his 20-year high school reunion in November at a bar in Larchmont, Northward.Y. Mr. Play a joke on, a New Rochelle High School graduate who lives in Midtown, said he attended his reunion to see the adult version of his classmates. But he was disappointed to find there was piddling he didn't already know considering of Facebook.
"Fifty-fifty every bit a deadline user of social networking, I have a pretty good grasp of where people are, what they do, their family unit life, etc.," he said. "And then a lot of the mystery of the traditional reunion was missing."
Add together high school reunions to the list of cultural familiarities forever altered past our hyperconnected lifestyle. Similar camping out for concert tickets and plots that hinge on missed phone calls, the archetype notion of the reunion, solidified by movies like "Peggy Sue Got Married" and "Romy and Michele'due south High School Reunion," is becoming equally old-fashioned as oversize Benetton sweaters.
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This lack of mystery has changed the experience of the upshot, said Donna DeFilippis, who has been organizing reunions for more than 30 years as owner and president of Reunions of America in Melville, North.Y.
"It used to exist that you lot walked in the door totally blind, and in that location was such energy and excitement in the room," Ms. DeFilippis said. "Today, even if you're not friends with them on Facebook, you can become a cursory look at your classmates online, then it takes that fundamental mystery away."
Omnipresence and the number of reunions held accept dropped in contempo years, reunion organizers said. What's unclear is whether social networks or the recession is to blame.
Bari Belosa, president of Reunions Unlimited in Englishtown, N.J., said her company holds most 220 reunions annually, downwards from 350 a few years ago. Nevertheless, there is a argent lining to the connectivity at present shared by erstwhile classmates: "We are able to find more than people," she said.
Attention a reunion is not cheap. Tickets typically are $85 to $125, to say cypher of flights, rental cars or babe sitters. If you're struggling to make ends meet, finding reasons to skip information technology isn't difficult.
Organizers fright attendance will keep dropping once the economy recovers since those approaching reunion age haven't lost contact with classmates. Consider Tracey Hepler, 28, who was a inferior in college when Facebook fabricated its debut and decided to skip her 10-year loftier school reunion.
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"If yous think about the Romy and Michele-type reunion, how they fantasize about people they oasis't been able to talk to and desire to show themselves off to people who put them downwards in high school, I don't have the itch to do that," said Ms. Hepler, who works in advertizement and lives in the East Village. "I oasis't lost touch with anyone, and I see the people I want to run across."
Of course, how they feel about their reunion typically depends on how they felt about high school. But as some people wouldn't attend their reunion if in that location were prize money involved, others can't imagine missing it, Facebook, MySpace or Google Plus be hanged.
"Zippo compares to putting your arms around your classmates and giving them a big hug," said Jordan Berman, the host of the Web show "Career Fist," who helped organize the 20-year high schoolhouse reunion of his class from Clarkstown Southward in Westward Nyack, N.Y., at a Doubletree hotel in November in Mahwah, N.J. As well, "Facebook sort of gives y'all a gustation or 1 perspective of a person, just it's edited. I think information technology creates more than curiosity. What does this person look like in person?"
For people like Mr. Berman, the familiarity bred by social networking has enhanced the experience.
Jodie Lasoff-Licata, a stay-at-home mother from Forest Hills, Queens, who attended her 20-year reunion in June, said she was able to skip the small talk with classmates "because we're far more than intimate with each other at present than when nosotros were in high schoolhouse" thanks to Facebook. "Yous just get to hang out with people and have conversations."
Several classmates greeted her at the reunion with the balls that she looked fine in her dress; she'd written on Facebook before that day that her daughter said it fabricated her look fat.
Just for some, the passing familiarity provided by social networks makes things more than uncomfortable. "It was very bad-mannered trying to reconnect with someone in this environment of forced camaraderie where you oasis't seen them in 20 years, but you kind of already know about them," said Amy Nutig, an unemployed medical biller who lives in Queens and who called her recent reunion at the Marriott hotel in Melville "anticlimactic."
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"Tell me exactly the circumstances of the photo you posted online," she said, mocking the strained conversation from the upshot. "How was that restaurant you tried last week?"
And for sheer social awkwardness, it's hard to vanquish finally seeing those people you never liked in high schoolhouse but for some reason are friends with online. Must you say howdy? If Facebook sometimes feels like a party filled with people y'all recognize just never say hello to, the reunion can feel painfully like that political party come to life.
If that lack of suspense has reduced the reunion into ane more cocktail party, then the culture at large has lost something, too. The plot of many a movie and book has been fueled by the drama, feet and hope for redemption associated with reunions. At present it'due south another fictional device that audiences aren't apt to buy.
Robin Schiff, the author and director of "Romy and Michele," in which two one-time high school outcasts effort to fabricate enviable lives for themselves before their 10-year reunion, said that her movie couldn't be made in the age of Facebook. "It would wreck the story," she said.
Ms. Schiff was in New York, where she was casting a musical theater version of her 1997 moving-picture show. The new version is not beingness updated, she noted, partly to preserve the fun of 2 girls reliving the fashions and music of the late 1980s, simply also to avert having to incorporate Spider web culture.
But she did imagine a way it could be washed. Maybe "Romy and Michele wouldn't be on Facebook," she said. "They are in their own piddling world."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/fashion/social-media-reduce-allure-of-high-school-reunions.html
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