Comment by al_borland

I graduated high school in 2001, which sounds like a similar era, but what I saw seemed very different. So maybe things changed pretty quickly once computers hit the mainstream and I’m just a bit older than you.

At my high school we had several girls get pregnant. I remember a kid getting a DUI and he made a necklace out of the tube used to blow in the breathalyzer and wore it with pride. In my first class of the day the kid who sat next to me had a flask he’d be drinking from at 8am.

A couple years after I graduated news broke that the track coach was basically throwing Diddy parties (we’ll leave it at that to avoid getting graphic). He, and several others, ended up in prison.

This was all in a sleepy little Midwest town that many would describe as charming and quaint.

Though Minecraft didn’t exist until I was already in the workforce. Facebook came out when I was in college. Facebook seemed to be a thing with certain groups (sorority girls seems to have a lot of competitions to get the most friends), but no one in my group of friends in college talked about it at all. I don’t think any of them even had accounts until later. Web 1.0 didn’t really change society, but Web 2.0 shifted it massively, especially once Web 2.0 made its way into people’s pockets.

I worked at the computer help desk at my university. We would get calls from high school seniors, who got accepted, trying to get their student email address early. They wanted to sign up for Facebook. I always found these calls strange, and the sorority girls too. People were either really into it, like an addict, or they were completely indifferent; I saw very little in between in those first years. Facebook probably blew up way more with the mainstream once they dropped the edu requirement. After that, there was a lot of social pressure to join.

Social media has always felt like a proxy for actual social interaction. It scratches just enough of that itch to make people think they are connected to others, without providing any actual connection, as the whole experience is largely passive.