It just struck me that people born after 2000 more or less have no concept of what a Friday night party without any phones whatsoever used to look like
I was watching This Is England from 2006, and it reminded me of the olden days of yore, in the fabled before-times, where people would just bunch up together every Friday in someone's flat, get drunk, blast music, and talk without distractions.
I can barely remember it now.
Anyway, get off my synthetic lawn.
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Yep. When our group had nothing to do we pretty much all went to somebody's flat and just hung out. Talked shit, smoked cigarettes, listen to music and laugh a lot. Pur friend circle was guys and girls who were not in relationships with each other so was cool as we could all be ourselves. Maybe we might jump in a car and go somewhere when it reached evening or just stayed in and had our own micro party with just the 7 of us. I do wish o had photos from then, but I am also glad we do t jave photos from then.
They also don't know what it's like for someone to move away and you just never see them again.
You can still do that now.
Source: I am appalling at keeping in touch with people I don't directly see face-to-face.
But it's an option for you to find people.
Back in the day, if someone changed their address and phone number, you'd have to work hard to find them.
My best friend in high school joined the navy and disappeared. I worked for decades to track him down. Then one day he was just on Facebook. We have nothing in common any more and nothing to talk about. But damn do I have some great memories of us hanging out.
Sure. That too. But honestly that's a tradeoff I'd be willing to do in a heartbeat.
Absolutely. Same here. When we're 50-100 years away from this social media is going to be discussed in the same conversation as prescribing heroin for a headache.
I think the better metaphor will be the printing press. That also caught society completely offguard. We went from a world where knowledge dissemination and speech was tightly controlled by religious and political elites to one where any crank with a press could share their fringe views far and wide. While this had its benefits, it also had its drawbacks. The printing press gave us the Protestant Reformation, but it also gave us the witch burning craze.
Kids these days will never know the simple joys of lighting a filthy mattress on fire in a derelict parking lot and drinking a case of warm beer that was the easiest thing to steal from that one gas station a town over with the near sighted night clerk.
My town had a bowling ball factory and on winter nights when the river was frozen we would steal reject balls and throw them off the bridge downtown. They made a truly incredible noise when they hit the ice.
That sounds fucking phenomenal. Now I need to see if there are any derelict bowling alleys around here to explore.
Maybe it's something of the people I socialize with. But we don't look at phones when we gather. It's impolite.
Same here. It's still occasionally a problem, someone will be phoning while we're hanging out. But generally we're all in tune with each other.
The problem I've been having lately, is my SO wanting to text every new exciting thing we do or buy, to our friends. I'm trying to be balanced about it, but I prefer to have fun stories to tell in person. Or have a new purchase be a surprise for the group when I bring it out.
I'm not anti phone, I text too, and tell people stuff before I see them. So again, I'm trying to be balanced, so I don't make a big fuss. It's just on my mind.
Edit: for reference from the other commenter, I'm definitely not over 60. Much younger. Though not a youth.
Phones are a great distraction when you're in a liminal space with nothing interesting going on.
But parties tend to be the opposite of that. The only reason someone looks at their phone is if they're trying to avoid the party. And why even show, in that case?
Are you 60+?
I think another thing is the lack of cameras. If you brought a camera before it was because you intended to take pictures. Now, everyone has a camera with them at all times.
Are the parties young people have nowadays just less wild because everyone has cameras? Or do people mostly party at clubs and bars and so they expect it to be on camera? Or do people not party as much?
When I was younger and before cell phone cameras of high quality were everywhere, parties were filled with debauchery and drugs like out in the open.
Is this why Gen Z thinks hedonism is cringe?
I believe so.
I think part of it might be the (reasonable) fear of being caught and it haunting you forever increasing overthinking. But I think the main reason is excessive access to everything online desensitizing and removing the enicing part of exploring 'taboo' stuff. Under that aspect I think, the internet as we have it today has also just reduced curiocity overall.
I think a more significant part though is that sex, drugs and the like are just not that taboo anymore. You are not hooking up as an act of rebelion against your parents if your parents lived hookup culture and are open about it.
And a lot of us are just more lonely/less social which loops back to the original post I guess.
Gen Z next generation boomers confirmed.
The boomers were the hippies FYI.
Same generation but wildly different people. Most people of their generation were not hippies but conservatives. Remember that Richard Nixon got reelected in a landslide, that wasn't hippies voting for him.
That is why this whole generation cliche nonsense is so absurd, it defines nothing but the prejudices of whoever is spouting it.
i'm honestly too old to know what the fuck this means. is this tiktok leetspeak genz 67 stuff?
i swear, these young kids putting down the pipe and picking up the TikTok have confused the hell out of me
Means basically "yep yep, Gen Z are the next generation boomers alright". Least I think.
(gen Z here, older than the 67 thing, younger than leetspeak, heh)
-- Frost
I have no idea what the hell you said either.
Whoopsie, sorry hah
"yep, sounds like Gen Z are the new equivalent to boomers, as I figured."
I was born in 1952.
To me, people born after 2000 are true, real "aliens"
Wait so there are Boomers on Lemmy?
The fact that you have not realized until now should tell you something
Deport'em All
We used to have bonfire parties out in the woods. Such good times.
Tennis - Deep in the Woods
Having nothing to do but engage others. Board games. RISK 2210, a 3hr game with 5 turns each. Does anyone actually play games together any more?
Had some friends over the other night. Busted out my vintage copy of catchphrase, the one with the paper disc. We had a blast with that thing, hours worth. Good times.
The amount of hours I have in that game could probably be measured in weeks. It is still probably my favorite iteration.
It’s weird because the social pressure is mostly off because you have this task before you all. The game itself is the social mediator and a great way to get to know the basics of someone.
And yet, phone up, eyes disengaged, anxieties and physical responses hyper analyzed like an prison inmate with nothing better to do but to overthink every tweek and quirk of their bodies. (It’s a thing, in psychology. Suddenly even a foot falling asleep because you’re sitting on it means something.). Granted, for non-inmates it passes into the counseling speak and self-diagnosis.
Versus just creating excuses, like a game, to talk to people.
I watched Donnie Darko the other night and the age of it just hit me all at once. That world is unrecognizable now.
Right? Jesus is this what our parents felt like when the Internet came? Poor bastards, I pity them still.
I was born in 93 and I don't know what any kind of friday night party is like.
That sucks. How come? Hell I'll drink with you right now. No phono.
...quietly puts away record collection...
This is what we'd do because we were broke. If we had money we'd go to bars and stuff, but otherwise we'd ask the supermarket for free fish ice and buy beers, then filled the bathtub with them.
As people came over they'd go drop the booze in the tub and pick up a cold one.
Many fun nights, though finding people using your bed, not so much.
I'm born in the late 80s and I don't know what a party without phones look like. We had phones by the time we were in highschool.
They were so cool back then too. The thing is, they never rang or dinged. They were mostly just a call out thing at that point.
They didn't ring? Custom ring tones were super popular.
Someone born in the late 80s likely wasn't in highschool until the 2000s.
Are you picturing me as a baby going to parties ?
I was also born in the late 80s. I remember having a cell phone in early high school. No one else had one. My parents would call me on it, and I would call them. Maybe you went to a little more upscale school where more kids had a phone, but all of my friends in high school had landlines. That changed toward the later years though, as everyone was getting cars and their parents wanted them to have phones.
But I more meant like, they were just used for phone calls and some texting. We didn’t have apps and push notifications going off constantly throughout the day. MySpace wasn’t even accessible on a phone.
Right, when you called it mattered. Minutes were expensive back then. Still is but it used to, too.
In fact, more or less, I paid about the same then as I do now per month. I get MORE for the money now but I'm still broke.
I went to public school.
OP said "Friday night party with no phones whatsoever"
They didn't say anything about social media or the internet.
Phones were a big part of our lives, they were new and fun. Absolutely they came out at parties.
What? No. In europe you could receive calls for free but calling out cost per minute billing so all the teenagers pretty much only had their phone as a means for their parents to call them. if you had to call your parents you'd call let it ring once and hang up, they'd see the missed call and call you back. if you had one kid whose parents loved them enough to give him a subscription with included minutes instead of pre-paid everyone in the group had to use their phone.
Change used to be gradual.
You could drop Cleopatra into Queen Victoria's court and she'd figure out the rules in a week.
Obama was cutting edge in 2008 because he used a Blackberry
I thought he was cutting edge because he didn't use a BlackBerry, he used an iPhone.
Also, the way Obama simped for the tech sector for eight long years might be proximate to why we're surrounded by Tech Fascists ten years after he left office.
My friends and I would be glued to the N64 or xbox instead
"Nobody looked at their phones during a party in 1999"
Holds up picture of a LAN Party
All the shirtless people, it must've been hot in there, all those computers and CRTs dumping out heat.
Oh God, I can smell it.
God I hope that's AI generated. The sheer load on those wires... maybe 20 machines could work off a 100A wire, but every other row there would need its own circuit and fuse.
Brownouts must have been plentiful and devastating
AI generated? That's quakecon! I was there! We ran lots of wires. We had to bring in 2 18 wheeler sized generators plus the hotel's power. We really only had brownouts at QC 2000, I think it was. It's was just solving for numbers once we knew the metrics to hit.
Well, that and money, but id always stepped up.
Bro all of you with friends happy with staying in one place are crazy. Every partier I know wants to change bars every 45m
There was no way to coordinate, so you'd talk in school on Thursday and decide about meeting up in so and so's house whose parents were away on Saturday and it would just spread like through some weird subcommunications channel and people would show up and you never knew what to expect because nobody was sure who would show up or when or if...
Then if you were like a couple of lads or gals short someone would be like "I know this dude at so and so adress let's go there!"...
It was spontaneous. I don't think spontaneity has changed much in humans over the past two decades, just the form of it, or perhaps the constraints within which it operates.
It feels less important now, less like an adventure.
Now bring me my defibrillator will you?
This is one thing I don’t understand about The Kids. Is the idea to get some sort of Instagram pic at every single place, like a narcissistic scavenger hunt?
Chasing the vibe (tm), this bar doesn't have it, maybe the next one will, to infinity
I was born after 2000. I couldnt really tell you the point of going to a party where you dont know anyone, like what seems to be most coming-of-age movies. Even some parties with friends have been extremely dull, and wrecking some strangers house seems like a great way to add weight to my conscience
Well, one could argue that not doing things that push the boundaries of your comfort zone is why echo chambers exist, whereas meeting people you don’t know and interacting with them is how you make new friends and potentially grow as a person.
I’m not saying you’re wrong for not wanting to do that, or even that you should want to do that, but that would be the point of it.
And for the record, parties that happen in movies aren’t really representative of what actual parties were commonly like, at least in my experience. The most wrecked that I’ve ever seen a house get after a party was needing to clean or pick up some trash. The way you keep the weight off of your conscience is to help the host clean up the next day, like a decent human being.
(I can’t afford a lawn, but get off of my dirt lot!)
Also to get laid. Which also helps a lot with echo chambers.
I am after 2000 and am not attached to my phone at all. To the point where my work tried contacting me for almost an entire day and I didn't check messages until end of day.
I'm a way it's easier to disconnect because you don't have a phone attached to the wall that you can hear ring from any room.
But there is an expectation of being immediately available so when you're not, people freak out.
The only time we get that now is when the power goes out. Even then most people just stay on their phones unless the cell networks are down.
Blackouts are among my favorite events in life. Just complete stillness, peace, and quiet. People start lighting candles, talking to each other in the streets...
I mean I was born in 1989 and I can't really remember it because I wouldn't be invited to those kinds of parties until after the invention of the smartphone.
Hell I remember in high school everyone spent most of the time swapping phone bodies around and sharing polyphonic ringtones via IR blaster. And later, Pokémon via a link cable.
Rose tinted view. There were plenty of distractions without phones and people would just get black out drunk wayyy more often than they do now. Maybe a positive is that people can pave themselves easier now.
Only when the road construction crew gets too drunk and starts playing around with the steam roller! 😁
As a post-2000 person, I can get a glimpse of that in some TV shows like breaking bad. Also when looking at my parents pictures from when they where younger.
But I've never experienced it. You can hang out with friends and all but good luck convincing 4+ friends to NOT take their phones to a gathering.
There's always someone texting their gf/bf, someone who likes to post too much, someone deep in online gatchas.
Even an inactive user will carry their phone because of navigation, feeling insecure at night, paying stuff...
There's a billion excuses (with a range of validity) to take your phone with you.
Meh 😕
Easily solved by social compact, box (or more fun, jenga tower) on a table, phones go in box. First person to remove phone from box for reasons other than poop break (I'm not a monster) or leaving owes the group something, even if it's just a little dance.
It's helped myself and most of the people I have done it with to truly understand how much we are actually addicted/dependant to the little electric serotonin dispensers.
YMMV on getting others to agree 😅
The House Party no longer exists. It is one of the great cultural losses.
My biggest blunder online as a millennial was going on MySpace or bebo and acting drunk
But nobody check that daily even at the height of its popularity
Geez, bebo.
Mine was being actually drunk and going on random boards on mIRC without changing my usual username
Same time
Both of these are you
I've been had.
i was born before 2000, and I don't know it neither
It kinda sounds like you just became boring and stopped going to parties lol. People still go to parties.
People do, but not as much as they did the decades before. That's for sure. There's a measurable decline of nightlife/clubs/bars/etc. almost everywhere. Phones are one reason, prices, corporatization and the vanishing of subcultures, outside in the real world, are others...
I did stop going to parties. Not to sound like a crotchety old man who hates everything new, but do people actually put their phones away and get on with "enjoying the night"?
Every time I see people (myself included) they're busy with their phones. Big groups of kids, adults, basically everyone. Its only the pensioners you see not using their phones all the time. Honestly its a serious question. I'm not here to argue that phonebad etc, just like, modern world different.
Like I will never know what its like to use a horse to do manual labour. Not saying that the old way is necessarily better, but the experience is something I will never have.
Is a joke? every oldie i see has their readers on stuck to a tablet or phone, parents, grandparents, aunts uncles and neighbors all in a trance
They’re the worst offenders imo. Nonstop BoomerBook and candy crushing
Maybe when theyre alone, but all the ones I see in groups theyre in groups.
I think mostly they dont know how to use them
I took a few months off from Lemmy and it's amusing to me that upon returning I find that almost every post in this com still breaks rule 2.
The thought is in the title, the explanation of how they thought it is in the post body
Spirit of the law not letter of the law, that's how I see it.
I'd prefer this over whatever they have on reddit right now. Like in my opinion, being lax with certain rules is fine.
Fair enough. My comment wasn't meant as criticism, I just genuinely find it amusing that the rules comms on Lemmy have just aren't enforced at all.
Guessing you spent all that away time on Reddit.
Feel free to stay there next time.
Eat shit. Lemmy has more bullies than reddit ever did. I've been permanently banned from Reddit for criticizing fascists. I spent that time on Bluesky, which is just as toxic as Lemmy. Seriously go fuck yourself.
You ever tried to see if your dong can reach the hole?
You sound like a victim. How's that working out for you?
Fantastic. It's how I know I'm not a bully. How does it feel to be a dumb cunt with an empathy disorder?
Someone will a victim complex can deformity be a bully. You just demonstrated it.