“Hanging Out”
For the most recent entry in asking if ghosts have civil rights, the Atlantic last month wonders: Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out.
And it’s an almost perfect Atlantic article, in that it looks at a real trend, finds some really interesting research, and then utterly fails to ask any obvious follow-up questions.
It has all the usual howlers of the genre: it recognizes that something changed in the US somewhere around the late 70s or early 80s without ever wondering what that was, it recognizes that something else changed about 20 years ago without wondering what that was, it displays no curiosity whatsoever around the lack of “third places” and where, exactly kids are supposed to actually go when then try to hang out. It’s got that thing where it has a chart of (something, anything) social over time, and the you can perfectly pick out Reagan’s election and the ’08 recession, and not much else.
There’s lots of passive voice sentences about how “Something’s changed in the past few decades,” coupled with an almost perverse refusal to look for a root cause, or connect any social or political actions to this. You can occasionally feel the panic around the edges as the author starts to suspect that maybe the problem might be “rich people” or “social structures”, so instead of talking to people inspects a bunch of data about what people do, instead of why people do it. It’s the exact opposite of that F1 article; this has nothing in it that might cause the editor to pull it after publication.
In a revelation that will shock no one, the author instead decides that the reason for all this change must be “screens”, without actually checking to see what “the kids these days” are actually using those screens for. (Spoiler: they’re using them to hang out). Because, delightfully, the data the author is basing all this on tracks only in-person socializing, and leaves anything virtual off the table.
This is a great example of something I call “Alvin Toffler Syndrome”, where you correctly identify a really interesting trend, but are then unable to get past the bias that your teenage years were the peak of human civilization and so therefore anything different is bad. Future Shock.
I had three very strong reaction to this, in order:
First, I think that header image is accidentally more revealing than they thought. All those guys eating alone at the diner look like they have a gay son they cut off; maybe we live in an age where people have lower tolerance for spending time with assholes?
Second, I suspect the author is just slightly younger than I am, based on a few of the things he says, but also the list of things “kids should be doing” he cites from another expert:
“There’s very clearly been a striking decline in in-person socializing among teens and young adults, whether it’s going to parties, driving around in cars, going to the mall, or just about anything that has to do with getting together in person”.
Buddy, I was there, and “going to the mall, driving around in cars” sucked. Do you have any idea how much my friends and I would have rather hung out in a shared Minecraft server? Are you seriously telling me that eating a Cinnabon or drinking too much at a high school house party full of college kids home on the prowl was a better use of our time? Also: it’s not the 80s anymore, what malls?
(One of the funniest giveaways is that unlike these sorts of articles from a decade ago, “having sex” doesn’t get listed as one of the activities that teenagers aren’t doing anymore. Like everyone else between 30 and 50, the author grew up in a world where sex with a stranger can kill you, and so that’s slipped out of the domain of things “teenagers ought to be doing, like I was”.)
But mostly, though, I disagree with the fundamental premise. We might have stopped socializing the same ways, but we certainly didn’t stop. How do I know this? Because we’re currently entering year five of a pandemic that became uncontrollable because more Americans were afraid of the silence of their own homes than they were of dying.