Elle’s online party scene
Item 1: Invitations
Facebook is one of the newest crazes among college students. It is a networking website developed originally for college students to make friends or keep in touch with old ones. The website is made up of user profiles and many applications linking each profile to thousands of activities, events, clubs, common interest groups, etc. One way in which this site has become a huge network for the party scene is the development of an online invitation system. Users can create an event, which is usually some type of party, and provide a description of location, time, place, and often theme. Facebook allows the party ‘host’ to send out these notifications on a large scale, often to entire groups of friends within their networks. Usually some type of outrageous picture(s) is(are) included in the invitation to guests a preview of what will be taking place.
Many of these parties are not even in celebration of a specific event, such as a birthday. Theme parties tend to be a trend among college students. Some of these party themes include: football pros and cheerleading hoes, highlighter parties, decades parties, professors and school girls, CEO’s and office hoes, and many more. The one thing I noticed about the majority of the titles of these theme parties is that most of them allude to the fact that females should be dressed provocatively. Most of the pictures tagged with the upcoming event also include pictures of examples of how to dress, including a few pictures of scantily clad girls.
Item 2: Party Pictures
Facebook is not only a major place for students to go to create party invitations, but it is a even bigger place students go to post pictures from outrageous parties they have attended. Thousands of photo albums, consisting of every type of party-going activity you could imagine are posted every day. These albums are a way for friends to share stories with others about their ‘wild’ night out with friends. Many of these pictures are seen as ‘inappropriate’ to be publicly displayed, and as a result Facebook has made it possible for users to limit which people can see which pictures on their profile. Don’t want teachers seeing you in your Halloween ‘naughty nurse’ outfit doing a beer bong? No problem…Facebook has your privacy settings covered.
While all this public sharing of college parties is fun and seemingly harmless, students are realizing more and more the consequences of posting such inappropriate pictures for millions of people to see. Work places are often checking Facebook pages of potential employees before making a final decision on who to hire. School athletic programs and other activities are checking pages weekly to make sure no underage drinking or drug abuse is taking place. Underage drinking has been a huge problem due to the accessibility of online photo albums. Students carelessly display pictures of themselves consuming alcohol all the time. The albums have begun to push the limits more and more of what is socially acceptable for public display. Photos often show students’ ‘other’ side, and reflect a society in which teenage morals seem to sink lower and lower with each decade.
Item 3: Blogs, Pictures, Videos
One website I briefly heard about by word-of-mouth was called College Party House. It was a website specifically dedicated for users to post pictures, videos, articles, and event notices from colleges across the country for others to view. I found the site to be extremely pornographic with its display of many college girls barely clothed in promiscuous activities/poses. Users post many pictures and videos from parties and events held at random house parties. A few pictures I came across fell under the topic of ‘shaming,’ apparently the process of playing a practical joke on a person who has passed out from too much alcohol. Shaming usually consists of friends drawing on the skin of the passed out partier…usually with permanent marker.
While there are pictures like this, much of the rest of the website displays provocative pictures of college girls ‘gone wild’. There are also many topics covering an event known as Beer Olympics. Beer Olympics is an event compiled of numerous beer drinking games and sets of teams that compete against each other for the win. Again, pictures and videos tend to be the most popular way for students to publicly display their care-free attitude towards partying.