Richmond Times-Dispatch: How Facebook and other social media killed the class reunion — and why we are worse off for it
This summer is my 30-year high school reunion, and because I did five years of undergrad, it is also my 25-year college reunion. But I didn’t go back to my old high school gymnasium in Woodbridge to reminisce. And I didn’t visit my old college dorm at the University of Virginia or my old college hangouts. Because of social media, I didn’t have to.
College and high school reunions used to be a rite of passage; movies and TV shows practically have a genre dedicated to them. The “American Pie” franchise had “American Reunion,” Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart stopped a terrorist plot to make it to their reunion in “Central Intelligence,” and Christopher Reeve’s Superman went back for his high school reunion in “Superman III.” TV shows like “30 Rock” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” had high school reunion episodes, and “Friends” and “Modern Family” had college reunion episodes. There was even a reality TV show called “High School Reunion.”
Yet today, only about 30% of graduates attend their high school reunions, and this points to a larger problem with the way we connect to each other. High school and college years were formative, surrounded by people who, at the time, were our world. But regardless of which archetype we were in school — the jock, the nerd or the theater kid — no one was friends with everyone, and we certainly didn’t like everyone. The fact that we didn’t like everyone from back then, or maybe even didn’t enjoy our time in school, was partly why reunions were so popular in the first place.