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)
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.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

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  1. Avatar of Dan Klarmann
    Dan Klarmann

    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.

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