American Consequences - August 2019

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a third sipped from a red solo cup while winking at the camera. (We were sophomores; the turkey basters full of gin punch would come later.) A classmate “woker” than me recently recalled this assembly to me at our 10-year reunion. It was, she argued, an evil exercise of voyeuristic slut-shaming on the part of the dean and college counselor... because the Smirnoff girls were in bikinis, she remembered. I only remembered wishing I’d looked less nerdy by comparison. We knew not what we did, but of course that was the whole point. It didn’t occur to us to worry whether the way we were using the Internet was irresponsible – because irresponsibility was what we’d aimed for. Twelvish years ago, posting while drunk, or about being drunk, was not so much something to be feared as it was fodder for hours of fun, often at the expense of strangers. The site “Texts From Last Night” aggregated submissions from recipients for readers’ Sunday morning schadenfreude. Facebook groups are now neighborhood committees and promotional platforms. But back then, they were meaningless coalitions that users could opt to join in expression of some loose affinity. One in particular, “In Fairfield County, We Pregame Harder Than You Party,” struck a chord with my cohort. It was a yawp of civic pride to click “join” in public agreement that we could drink those hicks from Litchfield under the table, any day of the week. Idiotic, sure, and certainly not something you’d want the admissions director to know. But I’d also call it a fundamentally human impulse. We see the same psychological cocktail at work in

It didn’t occur to us to worry whether the way we were using the Internet was irresponsible – because irresponsibility was what we’d aimed for.

the Instagram addict, for whom a “like” on a picture of an Aperol Spritz glistening in the fading light of the golden hour translates to membership in an identity larger than one’s lonely self. Every generation falls under the sway of some new addiction and outgrows an old one. It’s not our fault, per se. But when I read that social media’s conditioned the digital native to fear freedom from “control,” as the Mintel report found, all I could think was, What have we done?! Early adopters of social media didn’t know that our enthusiasm for these platforms would make them so omniscient that, within a decade, getting drunk enough to forget yourself wouldn’t be worth the risk. And now it’s too late. It’s the summer of the Aperol Spritz. Consider the sheer volume of photo-ready aperitivi you’d have to toss back before you stop caring whether the light is hitting your drink right. The way the spritz generation drinks, they couldn’t lose control if they wanted to.

Alice Lloyd is a writer in Washington, D.C.

American Consequences

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