Comment by phendrenad2
2 days ago
People are introverted and have no social skills thanks to smartphones. People have no shared interests in general, because there are so many niches. People have low self-esteem and body image issues. People are afraid that they'll get drunk and their behavior will be filmed and go viral. Previously available "soft" party drugs are too dangerous. People have no place to host a party, because they're all renters (not that it matters, the HOA has a strict no-smooth-jazz-music-after-3pm policy!)
> People are afraid that they'll get drunk and their behavior will be filmed and go viral.
I think this is an underappreciated "phones killed socialization" angle. People used to post partying pics on social media. Then employers started going through social media to screen candidates. Facial recognition and automatic tagging means that it's not sufficient to not post party photos to your own social media, you need to make sure they aren't posted anywhere.
Which is a deterrent to partying as a concept once you start thinking in terms of "will this be bad for my social credit if an informant reports me to the employability police by posting me drunk?"
I don't know how this didn't become a serious taboo. People who post pictures and video from a private event without everyone's consent should be shunned, but somehow this became normalized. I've heard of the recent trend to hand out stickers for everyone to put over their cameras during events, and that's a really good development, but we shouldn't even need to do that. It should be socially disgusting to even take the pictures in the first place.
It used to be fine! It used to be great, even. People like having photos of themselves having a good time. Back in the film era there would always be one person who wanted a picture at every event.
It's just that connecting it to the panopticon ruined everything.
> People have no place to host a party, because they're all renters
I've seen this repeated in several comments and I just don't get it -- renting a place, be it a college apartment or a full house as an adult, has never stopped me from throwing a party. Maybe if there was a "no parties" rule in the lease (which I've never seen, and I've rented at least a dozen different places) and the landlord lived in the building, but otherwise rentals are fair game.
If anything, renters are more likely to throw parties. They don't care about the building or even the inside in the long-term. The likely worst case is losing a month's rent in the deposit, which you're likely to lose some of anyway even if you keep it perfectly clean.
Yeah, pretty much every college town is full of renters throwing parties. One consequence of that is how student-aimed housing tends to be lower quality.
The no shared interests / too many niches thing doesn't go mentioned enough.