I hear this all the time as a rationalization for why people don't go out anymore, but I don't buy it. You're afraid people on the internet might see you having fun? I've had people shove a phone in my face and take video while I was out dancing. It's rude, but it's not a big deal. The reason people don't go out is because Live Nation/Ticketmaster made live music outrageously expensive and strangled small venues.
I don’t buy that as the or even a reason. I’m older and we had raves before any legit venue would touch them. I remember once a venue was forced to cancel due to local law enforcement pressure. It happened the day before. Word spread real quick that we would just meet in a field on someone’s private land, a place we regularly had keg parties and most teenagers were aware of. We always found a way to party in those days. It was the number one objective every week, knowing where we would party on the upcoming weekend. This all was in 90s before anyone I knew had a mobile phone and the internet was not very useful yet.
My observation is that we were just bored a lot. It has been a long time since young people have been as bored as we were back then.
Totally different decade, but my 90s high school experience was very similar to the movie Dazed and Confused. It’s odd how similar those experiences were versus what has come with the tech disruption of youth.
> My observation is that we were just bored a lot. It has been a long time since young people have been as bored as we were back then.
Eh, I think it depends more on the location, than anything else. I grew up rural, we did basically exactly the same thing as you described, hosting raves in the forest, beaches and what not until we get word that police was on it's way (tiny place, everyone knew everyone, police coming was big news as we didn't have local police).
We did have cellphones, the internet and more, but still, we were bored and dancing all night in a forest was the most fun we could have :) This was between around 2008-2011 sometime.
I think things really went off a cliff after around 2012 once phones and internet got good, and social media cranked up the algo games.
I dunno, we were "social mediaing" back in 2000s sometime, that's when most of the youth started posting pictures of themselves on the internet and using computers+webcams for communicating among ourselves, many of us used our Sony Ericsson (or similar) phones for taking pictures. I think that particular website that started it all, peaked around 2007 sometime, and was shut down by 2010 already, because of lack of activity. Plenty of sites between 2000-2010 that was the predators to modern social media too, some of them literally centered around sharing and commenting on images, kind of like Instagram, but way before.
For the impact to be felt as a generational shift that is observable IRL, the social media had to reach a certain point of critical mass. The apps/algo needed to be tweaked for addiction. It also become a firehose of content that was pretty realtime, so as to induce FOMO
Things like Flickr was a social site that had absolutely no impact on anyone’s behavior. There was no FOMO because it was just something you browsed at your own pace. Async web forums and email became synchronous chats. The phone started spending more time in your hand than your pocket.
Even things like streaming television wasn’t a binary but an evolution. Netflix streaming started in 2007. It wasn’t until 2012 they became a producer and started the binge phenomenon by releasing a full series all at once. Those first five years practically didn’t matter for Netflix. Many people saw no advantage over the traditional DVD shipping service. Once binging began people were jumping onto the streaming service in droves. It still took a few more years to really reach a point of saturation. Then, there was massive cord cutting and birth of the streaming service landscape of today that is heavily fragmented. But also provides an unlimited supply of entertainment that keeps people appeased and out of meatspace.
Sure there’s always a lag between city and rural on most things, even fashion trends and whatnot. That being said, I think the lag is gone and has fully saturated most places and demographics by now. The tiktokification is a huge factor that only hit in late teens in the US.