Every year around Thanksgiving, people trek home for not just the holiday, but for a long-weekend extravaganza of eating, drinking, and reconnecting with old friends from their old neighborhoods. For some, this reunion is informal, merely congregating at the local watering hole or "townie" bar. For others, though, the dreaded --or anticipated (largely depending on if you've lost weight or are unrecognizable)-- high school reunion serves as the facilitator in a more structured reunion with your friends from yesteryear. It brings a small community together once again, albeit in a mostly forced, awkward, and drunken way, in the hopes of reminding everyone of their shared inside jokes, memories, and potentially, worst years of their life.
Okay, maybe it's not entirely bad. High school reunions can be fun. After all, the people you graduated from high school with know you in a way that someone can only know you after sitting through class after class from kindergarten to senior year. These are the kids you sat on the bus with, the kids you attempted to outrun during gym class, the kids who misguidedly attempted to explain the "birds and the bees" to you for the first time in elementary school. Sure, the people you graduated from high school with may not necessarily know the person you are now, but they were a part of those very crucial formative years as you were attempting to become a functional and educated human being.
So I digress. High school reunions give you the opportunity to reconnect with everyone, for better or for worse. However, in the age of social media, Google searches, and Skype, you are never really more than a click away from your fellow class of (insert high school graduation date here) members. Just as the Internet is killing print media (debatable), and the video killed the radio star, Facebook is killing the high school reunion.
Think about all of the stereotypical hype surrounding a high school graduation: wondering what your crush looks like now; if the nerds are now ruling the world; if the cheerleaders have horizontally outgrown their uniforms; and more importantly, wondering what sort of interactions will take place at said reunion. This information is readily available prior to the fateful day in November, thanks to whatever social media platform on which you choose to connect with those from your past. You might not still actively talk to your former classmates, but there they are, "blowing up" your feed with posts from their weekend festivities, recent vacations, and life updates. Sure, you and Sally Smith may have parted ways after your senior prom fiasco, vowing never to speak to each other again, but you do know where she works, that she recently got promoted, is moving in with her boyfriend, and has dyed her hair a horrific shade of blonde.
That's the thing. Facebook takes all of that anticipation and "magic," we'll say, out of the high school reunion. You already know everything that has happened to your classmates post-graduation, and yet, you show up to the reunion location, asking the appropriate small talk questions, as if you didn't already know everything they were doing. They might fill in the blanks, yes, but if you're just asking due to a technicality, then what's the point? The thrill just isn't there.
There's a certain expectation that when you go to a high school reunion, you'll learn new things about your former classmates and have refreshing and exciting interactions with them -- the kind you wouldn't have been able to have when you were in school together because you had such a familiar history. Even only five years removed from high school, you are (hopefully) not the same person you were when you got that high school diploma. You're also (hopefully) no longer just an extension of the "click" or social group you represented when you were in school. However, with Facebook granting us all access to each other's lives, we cannot escape that high school hierarchy or categorization because we don't have time to grow and develop away from the watchful eyes of those very same classmates who placed us in those hierarchies and categories to begin with. Inevitably, we show up at our high school reunions reverting to the same clicks/groups as opposed to intermingling and learning new things about our classmates.
Okay, I'll admit, the interactions at my high school reunion weren't entirely limited to the people I was friends with way back when, but I do think that with Facebook, it's harder for us to escape those former stereotypes, and even harder to reconnect in a way that's meaningful and mature past our high school years. We have the potential to keep in touch with our former flames, or poke an old friend, and even though preserving that connection via social media isn't necessarily bad, it is rendering an event like the high school reunion to lose some of its luster and appeal.
I'm interested to see what happens in another five years. I anticipate that with time, as we move away from our hometown and make our way further into the real world, my classmates and I will finally be able to have a proper reunion. Til then, I'm going to limit my Facebook poking to those in my current circle only. You've been warned.
I referenced this once, and now it's stuck in my head; therefore, I must share it with you.
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