Social sites help and hurt high school reunions
This article in Time Magazine points out that finding your former high school class mates has never been easier, thanks to Facebook, alumni sites and other social sites.
Image by Alan Light at Flickr (creative commons)
There’s another angle to the story, however. When you go online, you can figure out who’s successful and who fell through the cracks. With a mere click, you can find out who has started looking old, who’s still hot and who’s still married to whom. You can figure out where you stand in your high school pecking order without attending the high school reunion. In other words, you can figure out many of those things that motivate many people to attend reunions. For that reason, some have pointed at social sites as the reason many classes are skipping their reunions entirely.
- The straight scoop regarding public high school dropouts
- Now I get it! We’re all back in high school.
- Principal drowns hundreds of grade school students in school basement
- Center For Inquiry questions politically-skewed high school textbook for classes on U.S. government
- Check out these high school kids playing Shostakovich
This is part of the cultural shift away from perpetual disunion. A decade ago, one had to make plans ahead of time and carefully work out meetings. Now, one is never out of touch. Who needs a reunion if those with whom one may have a connection never fall out of touch? Not for a day?
As for me, I didn’t bother with my reunions for the same reason that I answered teachers who declared, “These are the best years of your life!” with “You mean it gets even worse?” It didn’t.